the wildly overrated work of Hitchcock, whose manipulative tendencies took the total film to new heights of totalitarianism in The Birds, Vertigo, Marnie and Psycho. Hitch is cinema's Judas: he makes his films out of virtuoso playing on the cinematic apparatus, but on themes of profound misanthropy which come to their peak in the vile Frenzy, perhaps one of the first films to revel in its own irrationalism at the expense of humanity. Even the adulation would not matter, were it not that Hitchcock's Olympian style, his Nietzschean-aristocratic ethics of entitlement, in its haughty disdain for audience, producers and actors alike, seems to define what cinema can do as autonomous machine, and to do so falsely. In this way, Hitchcock's carreer follows with more precision than anyone else's the loss of innocence that overcame the cinema at the end of the 1940s. His English films of the 20s and 30s, given their dark subtexts, are nonetheless charming, at times erudite, at times frothy, frequently experimental. As his first American film, Rebecca not so much loses innocence as mocks it. That cynicism may be a legitimate response to the then-new triumph of the consumer commodity, but in its absolute claims for itself as the purest mode of film, it sells out the cinema at the moment in which the money-lenders most needed to be removed from the temple, and a rare moment in which that might have been possible.
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I am so pleased to read this. When I started teaching film in the 1970s Hitchcock was considered the great (British?) director of my father's generation and I prepared myself to be impressed. But frankly all I saw when I studied his films was creaky, old-fashioned and stiff film-making. I suppressed my initial response in order to join a community of film scholars I suppose and indeed found Hitchcock a gift to teaching: narrative structure, Freudian theory, auteurism etc. all became unambiguous for my students through his film. Nevertheless I had a cynical attitude to the rise of Hitchcock literature over the years that raised him to genius status. William Goldman's seemingly trashy but insightful 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' seemed the only balanced view I could offer students for many years but with two films out last year that re-draw the 'wickedly funny Hitch'as a dark and obsessive sadist, I hope the tide is beginning to turn to a more nuanced assessment at last.
I am so pleased to read this. When I started teaching film in the 1970s Hitchcock was considered the great (British?) director of my father's generation and I prepared myself to be impressed. But frankly all I saw when I studied his films was creaky, old-fashioned and stiff film-making. I suppressed my initial response in order to join a community of film scholars I suppose and indeed found Hitchcock a gift to teaching: narrative structure, Freudian theory, auteurism etc. all became unambiguous for my students through his film. Nevertheless I had a cynical attitude to the rise of Hitchcock literature over the years that raised him to genius status. William Goldman's seemingly trashy but insightful 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' seemed the only balanced view I could offer students for many years but with two films out last year that re-draw the 'wickedly funny Hitch'as a dark and obsessive sadist, I hope the tide is beginning to turn to a more nuanced assessment at last.
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