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A series of fascinating and groundbreaking meditations on six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock.
Film scholar Murray Pomerance presents a series of fascinating and groundbreaking meditations on six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, a master of the cinema. Two of the films, North by Northwest and Vertigo, are extraordinarily famous and have been seen––and misunderstood––countless times. Two others, Marnie and Torn Curtain, have been mostly disregarded by viewers and critics or considered to be colossal mistakes, while the remaining two, Spellbound and I Confess, have received almost no critical attention at all. Here in a twentieth-anniversary edition, with a new preface, An Eye for Hitchcock-the first volume of the Hitchcock Quartet (which includes A Dream of Hitchcock, A Voyage with Hitchcock, and A Silence from Hitchcock)-examines these movies under a bold new light. Pomerance takes us deep into the structure of Hitchcock's vision and his screen architecture, revealing key elements that have never been written about before. Pomerance also clearly reveals the link between Hitchcock's work and a wide range of thinkers and artists in other fields, thereby offering viewers of Hitchcock's films the rare opportunity to see them afresh and with new excitement.
"Leave it to Murray Pomerance, one of the most singular voices in film studies, to reintroduce us to Hitchcock's work in all its infinite mystery, retrieving it from the frameworks of theory and interpretation that have too often reduced it to convenient clichés. This searching, provocative, and revelatory text is a lesson in necessarily idiosyncratic attention. No one quite savors luminous and sonorous details like the author of this book—except for Hitchcock himself, whose sensibility finds itself mirrored and refracted in Pomerance's elegant prose." — Rick Warner, author of The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Revised Edition
Introduction: His Master's Voice
1. A Great Fall: Action North by Sincerity Northwest
2. A Bromide for Ballantine: Spellbound, Psychoanalysis, Light
3. The Tear in the Curtain: I forbid you to leave this room
4. Once in Love with Marnie
5. I Confess and the Men Inside
6. Gabriel's Horn: Vertigo and the Golden Passage
Notes
Works Cited and Consulted
Index