Film Quarterly (2009) - Hitchcock's Romantic Irony

Details

• book review: Hitchcock's Romantic Irony
• author(s): David Sterritt
• journal: Film Quarterly (01/Apr/2009)
• issue: volume 62, issue 3, pages 83-84
• DOI: 10.1525/fq.2009.62.3.83
• journal ISSN: 0015-1386
• publisher: University of California Press
• keywords: "Hitchcock's Romantic Irony" - by Richard Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Ben Hecht, Claude Chabrol, David Bordwell, David Sterritt, Frenzy (1972), Henry Bumstead, John Orr, North by Northwest (1959), Paramount Pictures, Psycho (1960), Rebecca (1940), Richard Allen, Robert Burks, Rope (1948), Slavoj Žižek, Suspicion (1941), Topaz (1969), Vertigo (1958), Éric Rohmer

Links

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Abstract

Review of "Hitchcock's Romantic Irony" - by Richard Allen

In subsequent chapters Allen rebuts poststructuralist claims to Hitchcock as a poet of the empty signifier; discusses Hitchcockian dandyism and some films' commentary on the relationship between representation and referent, in the manner of The Picture of Dorian Gray; makes the case for German expressionism as a key influence on Hitchcock, with arguments less developed but more keenly focused than John Orr's in Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2005); contemplates what Slavoj Žižek calls the Hitchcockian Blot, an incongruous "stain" that signals the immanence of a "chaos world or shadow world" (140) that threatens our habitual reality; and analyzes the emotive, dramatic, and semiotic roles of color in Hitch's mise-en-scène.