Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock’s films. In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral—if not amoral or immoral—world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker’s moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.

Hitchcock was a masterful director, popular with audiences of all ages and critically acclaimed both during and after his unusually long career. What may have been sensed by many viewers but not fully articulated until now is the extent to which his works subtly engage philosophical themes: What is evil, and how does it shield and reveal itself? Can we know what is inside the mind of another person? What is at stake when one knows the truth but cannot speak of it or cannot persuade others? How is Hitchcock's loving critique of humanity manifested in his films? Why are Hitchcock's works so often ambiguous? What is the hidden purpose and theory behind his use of humor? Hitchcock employs cinematic techniques–from camera angles and use of light to editing and sound–partly to convey suspense and drama but also to engage and advance philosophical issues, ranging from identity crises to moral ugliness. Roche unlocks Hitchcock's engagement with philosophical themes, and he does so in a way that appeals to both the novice and the seasoned philosopher, as well as enthusiastic admirers of Hitchcock's films.

When Richard Schickel stated unequivocally in 1972 that "We're living in a Hitchcock world, all right", he did so without even mentioning the film that now stands at the top of the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll: Vertigo. That omission needs to be redressed when we think about the Hitchcock world we live in now. Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock's Masterpiece Then and Now gathers essays that offer a variety of approaches to what many consider to be Hitchcock's signature film, one that shows him operating at full strength as a cinematic artist portraying some of the defining elements of modern life: romantic exhilaration and anxiety, the attractiveness and elusiveness of love, and the interpenetration of pain, pleasure, life, and death in our psyche and our culture. The pieces in this volume explore numerous aspects of how, broadly speaking, Vertigo is about characters haunted by memories and desires; how the film itself is haunted by numerous literary and cinematic fore- bearers; and how it continues to haunt not only filmmakers but artists working in other media as well. Essays that concentrate on formative or interpretive contexts of the film, including Greek mythology, early German cinema, film noir, an ensemble of (mostly) French writers and filmmakers, andmodern and postmodern art are complemented by others that present close readings of hidden details in the film, its use of multiple gazes that underscore its meaning and drama, the darker sides of even gestures of love and hospitality, and how the film embodies Hitchcock's "late style". Taken together the essays in the volume reinforce how Vertigo is, like the majestic trees visited by the two main characters in the film, sempervirens – an enduring masterpiece of then, now, and, we can safely say, the future.

Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Žižek’s pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek’s own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civilization’) and Žižek’s idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek’s own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Žižek (just as Žižek in his collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek’s ideas.

Explores Hitchcock’s repeated voyages into the dreamlike. 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 Windowaround 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. “This lively, informed, insightful book is a like a jazz riff on the six films under consideration, mixing cultural, historical, filmic, and literary allusions to interpret each film. I think it would be as interesting and helpful to a person just beginning to study Hitchcock’s films seriously as to an academic who has been studying and writing about Hitchcock for years.” — Richard A. Gilmore, author of Doing Philosophy at the Movies

Film scholar Murray Pomerance presents a series of meditations on six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, a master of the cinema. Two of the films are extraordinarily famous and have been seen - and misunderstood - countless times: North by Northwest and Vertigo. Two others, Marnie and Torn Curtain, have been mostly disregarded by viewers and critics, or considered to be colossal mistakes, while two others, Spellbound and I Confess have received almost no critical attention at all. Hitchcock's vision and his screen architecture, revealing key elements and showing how Hitchcock was profoundly interested not only in social class, but also in humanity's philosophical predicament, as we traverse a world fraught with shifting appearances, multiple deceptions, vulnerability and peril. Pomerance also reveals the link between Hitchcock's work and a wide range of thinkers and artists in other fields.

In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage—a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films—has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.