Hitchcock's Cryptonymies, Volume 2In the first "The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock films a clay pigeon crossing the sky, a dark disc resembling a black sun. When the same work takes viewers into a temple for sun worshippers (it turns out to be a front for spies), another black orb is introduced: a black marble used to hypnotize initiates. Tom Cohen traces this motif--and many other--seeing it as an explicit challenge both to Enlightenment-era protocols of representation and to the auteurism that has defined studies of Hitchcock. This second volume presents the director's works as a radical collage of images and absences, letters and numbers, citations and sound that together mark Hitchcock as a knowing figure who was entirely aware of his--and cinema's--place at the dawn of a global media culture, as well as of the cinema's revolutionary impact on perception and memory. Cohen's provocative interrogation culminates in an innovative close analysis of "To Catch a Thief, a work disregarded by the critical establishment as being merely light entertainment. Cohen sees Hitchcock's films as "war machines"--hiding in plain sight at the center of the film canon--designed as much to erode traditional models of home, family, and state as to sabotage increasingly obsolete ways of seeing and knowing. |
Contents
Hitchcocks Esperanto | 1 |
Part I Travel Service Window | 11 |
Part II Prehistory of the Afterlife of Cinema | 53 |
Part III Jump Cuts | 105 |
Part IV The Black Sun | 167 |
Notes | 267 |
| 299 | |
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Common terms and phrases
39 Steps accelerated aesthetic Alfred Hitchcock animemes appears archival atomization Avenger bar series birds black hole Blackmail bomb called cameo camera Cary Grant Catch a Thief cinematic citational cites cognitive Conrad Burns credit sequence deauratic double earth effect epistemo-political evisceration Family Plot faux figure film fold frame Francie gala gender global Grace Kelly graphic hermeneutic Hitchcock hyperbolic identified inscription inversely language Lee Edelman letters light Lodger logic logos MacGuffin machine Mae West marks memory metaphor mimetic mnemonic Mother murder narrative Norman North by Northwest ocularcentric opening parole performative personification Peter Conrad play precedes premise preoriginary pretense programs prosthetic Psycho pyrotechnic reading recurs reference Riviera Robie Robie's Sabotage Saboteur scene screen Secret Agent seems serial sheer shot signature signifying spectral Spellbound suspended teletechnic tion tourist trace tracks travel folder heaven travel service window trope turn ventriloquized Vertigo viewer virtual visual word