The Metafictional Hitchcock
The Experience of Viewing and the Viewing of Experience in "Rear Window" and "Psycho
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8905191 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Barton Palmer (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 4-4 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225456 |
| OpenAlex | W2319170692 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 5 |
First lauded as a master of suspense whose art consists in the expert manipulation of the twists and turns of complex narratives, then recognized as an artist struggling to give shape to his intellectual/religious obsessions, Alfred Hitchcock is now being recuperated for a generation raised on Brecht, which values selfreflexivity more than either storytelling virtuosity or thematic profundity.' Actually, current work on Hitchcock gives us two different, but related portraits of the director. On the one hand, poststructuralist and psychoanalytically-oriented critics such as Raymond Bellour and Bill Nichols have seen in Hitchcock's films (especially those of his later American period) a realism whose strategies of containment can be readily stripped away to display their psycho-social discontents. Thus Psycho and The Birds are made to speak of despite the director's conscious intention to hide all traces of the enunciation process.2 On the other hand, Robert Stam has argued for the view that Hitchcock was a subtle critic of his institutional apparatus, a filmmaker who deviously undermined the premises of the medium (such as the scopophilic interpellation of the spectator) and the thematic/narrative conventions of realist narrative. Hitchcock, Stam suggests, bears comparison with more self-conscious creators such as Luis Bunuel.3 I will not argue that there is no truth in these new ways of looking at Hitchcock's later American films. Adopting a multum in parvo approach that depends on the symptomatic analysis of individual sequences, Nichols and Bellour have revealed much about the director's sexual politics and his use of the Hollywood storytelling machine. And Stam, with a number of suggestive thematic parallels, does in turn demonstrate that Hitchcock, an institutional filmmaker, and Bunuel, a self-avowed modernist with a disdain for the banalities of commercial moviemaking, have produced surprisingly similar bodies of work; such similarities, as Stam rightly infers, mean that the ease with which the Hitchcockian narrative deconstructs and displays its own premises to view is, at least in part, an index of the director's intention, his compulsion to undermine the working of narrative/representational structures toward ideological invisiblity. I would argue, however, that Bellour and Nichols, on the one hand, and Stam, on the other, have usefully identified elements in the Hitchcockian oeuvre which exist within the films themselves as a source of creative tension; Hitchcock's later American films, in short, are neither classic nor modernist, but rather me
Aesthetics · Art · Visual arts · Window (computing · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 1987 - 2011 (25) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |