Hitchcock's Romantic Irony

337 Pages·2007·2.74 MB·English

by  Allen, Richard, Hitchcock, Alfred

Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony
Film and Culture Series
John Belton, General Editor

Hitchcock’s
Romantic Irony
Richard Allen
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Richard, 1959–
Hitchcock’s romantic irony / Ri chard Allen.
p. cm. — (Film and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-13574-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-13575-7
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-50967-1 (ebook)
1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series.
PN1998.3.H58A73 2007
791.4302’33092—dc22
2007012808
(cid:2)(cid:2)
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and
durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Reproduction of color stills was made possible with a generous grant from the
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Portions of the following work have been published in slightly different form and
are reprinted with the permission of the editors and publishers: “Hitchcock, or the
Pleasures of Metaskepticism,” October 89 (Summer 1999): 69–86; “The Lodger and the
Origins of Hitchcock’s Aesthetic,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 38–78; “Hitchcock
and Narrative Suspense: Theory and Practice,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey,
eds., Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amster-
dam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003); “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock,”
in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Film and Literature
(New York: Blackwell, 2004), 298–325; and “Sir John and the Half-Caste: Identity and
Representation in Hitchcocks’s Murder!,” Hitchcock Annual 13 (2004–2005): 92–126.
In memory of
Tom Keavy (1991–2003)
Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their
Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail.
The blank grey was not made to blast their hair,
But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail
They were all summer: lightning might assail
And shiver them to ashes, but to trail
A long and snake-like life of dull decay
Was not for them—they had too little clay.
— lord byron

Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xix
p art i: narrative form
1 Romantic Irony 3
2 Suspense 38
3 Knowledge and Sexual Difference 72
part ii: visual style
4 Sexuality and Style 117
5 Expressionism 164
6 Color Design 218
Conclusion 251
Notes 261
Index 281

I n America … you respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they
were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder
like scenes of love. Anyway, it’s the same man we are talking about, the same
man, and the same artist.
—françois truffaut
I t seemed to me, as much from certain precise points made in the conversa-
tion as from statements gathered from Hitchcock’s collaborators, that he
had a permanent notion of mise-en-scène, that of a tension in the interior
of a sequence, a tension that one would not know how to reduce either to
dramatic categories or plastic categories but which partakes of both at the
same time. For him it is always a question of creating in the mise-en-scène,
starting from the scenario, but mainly by the expressionism of the framing,
the lighting, or the relation of the characters to the décor, an essential insta-
bility of image. Each shot is thus for him like a menace, or at least an anxious
waiting. . . . One recognizes at a glance the most banal still from one of his
fi lms, in the admirably determined quality of this disequilibrium.
—andré bazin