Hitchcock's Motifs (Film Culture in Transition)

Hitchcock's Motifs (Film Culture in Transition)

Michael Walker

Language: English

Pages: 512

ISBN: 9053567720

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Alfred Hitchcock’s films are renowned the world over, and a mountain of literature has detailed seemingly every facet of them. Yet remarkably few studies have solely focused on the recurring motifs in Hitchcock’s films. Michael Walker remedies this surprising gap in Hitchcock literature with an innovative and in-depth study of the sustained motifs and themes threaded through Hitchcock’s entire body of work. 

Combing through all fifty-two extant feature films and representative episodes from Hitchcock’s television series, Walker traces over forty motifs that emerge in recurring objects, settings, character-types, and events. Whether the loaded meaning of staircases, the symbolic status of  keys and handbags, homoeroticism, guilt and confession, or the role of art, Walker analyzes such elements to reveal a complex web of cross-references in Hitchcock’s art. He also gives full attention to the broader social contexts in which the motifs and themes are played out, arguing that these interwoven elements add new and richer depths to Hitchcock’s oeuvre. An invaluable, encyclopedic resource for the scholar and fan, Hitchcock’s Motifs is a fascinating study of one of the best-known and most admired film directors in history.

Pepe Le Moko (BFI Film Classics)

Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited

Odd Man Out (BFI Film Classics)

The Films of Josef von Sternberg

La Grande Illusion (BFI Film Classics)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Danvers, the heroine herself moves from the bed to the window – with the sea in the distance – and is almost persuaded by Danvers to kill herself. After her violation, Marnie – it would seem – really does attempt suicide, throwing herself into the ship’s swimming pool. In both films, then, Hitchcock uses the traumatic associations of the bed scenes to push the heroine to the brink of suicide. In Marnie, this actually occurs on the honeymoon itself, which ensures that, when the couple return to

other man also has a face covered in shaving cream. It could be that the detectives are still looking for Roger in his redcap disguise. It could equally be that the sight of two shaving men simply fooled them. THE CORPSE Fig. . Still: Murder!: the traumatising corpse. Diana (Norah Baring) sits in an amnesiac fugue in front of the body of Edna Druce (visible in the mirror). On either side of Diana are Doucie (Phyllis Konstam) and Ted Markham (Edward Chapman); kneeling by the body is Edna’s

contexts in which they are found. My project here is an extension of this notion. First, motifs are not confined to objects, but include other features in the films as well. Second, I am looking at the circulation and function of these motifs not just in individual films, but across Hitchcock’s work overall, i.e. intertextually. Third, this intertextual context includes films (and other narratives) in general and, in some cases, I compare Hitchcock’s inflections of a given motif with those

getting rid of an unwanted wife; the bed only became the (presumed) site for the murder because she was an invalid. In his series of ‘necktie murders’ in Frenzy, Rusk first ‘rapes’, then strangles his victims. Here we could perhaps characterise the murders as stemming from the repression of desire, but this is enacted in a highly perverse manner: Rusk is projecting on to the women blame not just for his own rapacious impulses, but also for his failure to complete the sex act (Modleski : ).

middle-aged widows, she is appalled, and protests vehemently: ‘But they’re alive! They’re human beings!’ Coldly, her uncle turns to her: ‘Are they, Charlie? Or are they fat, wheezing animals? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?’ Given the  date of production, the Nazi overtones are unmistakable: the idea that ‘useless’ human beings should be ‘put down’. Indeed, one of Uncle Charlie’s contemptuous phrases for the widows – ‘smelling of money’ – is precisely the sort

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