A Dream of Hitchcock examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock's work—dreamscapes, dream processes, the dream effect—by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot. The Hitchcockian dream, as invoked here, is not so much a dream as it is a way of understanding, in its dramatic contexts, an "unearthly," irrational quality in the filmmaker's work. Rebecca revolves around problems of memory; To Catch a Thief around uncertainty; Saboteur around pungent aspiration; Family Plot around intuition; Rear Window around expansive imagination; and Strangers on a Train around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past, the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain, and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance's distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock's work allows these films to inform theorization, not the other way around. His original, provocative, and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy, improbability, doubt disconcertion, hope, memory, intuition, and belief, through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life.

Following from An Eye for Hitchcock and A Dream for Hitchcock, this third volume of reflections upon Alfred Hitchcock's work gives extensive meditations on six films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion. Murray Pomerance's sources come from a wide territory of interest, including production study, philosophy, cultural history, and more. The book is written as an homage to, and in many ways address to, not only the story content of these films but, more importantly, their overall filmic texture, which involves compositions, visual nuances, sounds, rhythms, and Hitchcock's unique treatments of human experience. The voyage theme plays a key—and moving—role in all the films discussed here.

From early silent features like The Lodger and Easy Virtue to his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies were adapted from plays, novels, and short stories. Hitchcock always took care to collaborate with those who would not just execute his vision but shape it, and many of the screenwriters he enlisted—including Eliot Stannard, Charles Bennett, John Michael Hayes, and Ernest Lehman—worked with the director more than once. And of course Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, his most constant collaborator, was with him from the 1920s until his death. In Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, Mark Osteen has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore how Hitchcock and his screenwriters transformed literary and theatrical source material into masterpieces of cinema. Some of these essays look at adaptations through a specific lens, such as queer aesthetics applied to Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, while others tackle the issue of Hitchcock as author, auteur, adaptor, and, for the first time, present Hitchcock as a literary source. Film adaptations discussed in this volume include The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Rear Window, Vertigo, Marnie, and Frenzy. Additional essays analyze Hitchcock-inspired works by W. G. Sebald, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and others. These close examinations of Alfred Hitchcock and the creative process illuminate the significance of the material he turned to for inspiration, celebrate the men and women who helped bring his artistic vision from the printed word to the screen, and explore how the director has influenced contemporary writers. A fascinating look into an underexplored aspect of the director’s working methods, Hitchcock and Adaptation will be of interest to film scholars and fans of cinema’s most gifted auteur.

Meet the inventor of modern horror. This complete guide to the Hitchcock canon is a movie buff's dream: from his 1925 debut The Pleasure Garden to 1976's swan song Family Plot, we trace the filmmaker's entire life and career. With a detailed entry for each of Hitchcock's 53 movies, this clothbound book combines insightful texts, photography, ...

Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Biography An Economist Best Book of 2021 A fresh, innovative biography of the twentieth century’s most iconic filmmaker. In The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon—what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world. The book’s twelve chapters illuminate different aspects of Hitchcock’s life and work: “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up”; “The Murderer”; “The Auteur”; “The Womanizer”; “The Fat Man”; “The Dandy”; “The Family Man”; “The Voyeur”; “The Entertainer”; “The Pioneer”; “The Londoner”; “The Man of God.” Each of these angles reveals something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived but also the various versions of himself that he projected, and those projected on his behalf. From Hitchcock’s early work in England to his most celebrated films, White astutely analyzes Hitchcock’s oeuvre and provides new interpretations. He also delves into Hitchcock’s ideas about gender; his complicated relationships with “his women”—not only Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren but also his female audiences—as well as leading men such as Cary Grant, and writes movingly of Hitchcock’s devotion to his wife and lifelong companion, Alma, who made vital contributions to numerous classic Hitchcock films, and burnished his mythology. And White is trenchant in his assessment of the Hitchcock persona, so carefully created that Hitchcock became not only a figurehead for his own industry but nothing less than a cultural icon. Ultimately, White’s portrayal illuminates a vital truth: Hitchcock was more than a Hollywood titan; he was the definitive modern artist, and his significance reaches far beyond the confines of cinema.

""This is not a book about Hitchcock. There are many of those in critical circles, and I wouldn't presume to add a great deal more to the landmark studies of scholars such as Raymond Bellour, Robin Wood, and William Rothman, among many others. But it is a book that attempts to situate Hitchcockian cinema, and more specifically, an aspect of the Hitchcockian style in the aftermath of Hitchcock's rich, complex, and sometimes unwieldy filmmaking career. In a series of discussions with François Truffaut in 1962, Hitchcock, then at the height of his influence as a filmmaker and prior to the perceived decline of his cinema in the later 1960s, gestures toward an artistic disposition in the following exchange on Rear Window (1954): "Truffaut: I imagine that the story appealed to you primarily because it represented a technical challenge: a whole film from the viewpoint of one man, and embodied in a single, large set. Hitchcock: Absolutely. It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That's one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea." ""--