Film Quarterly (2013) - Camera, character, counterplot: on watching Hitchcock wrong
Details
- article: Camera, character, counterplot: on watching Hitchcock wrong
- author(s): Brandon White
- journal: Film Quarterly (2013)
- issue: volume 66, issue 3, page 28
- journal ISSN: 0015-1386
- publisher: University of California Press
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Basil Radford, Cary Grant, Cecil Parker, Claude Rains, Conspiracy, Dame May Whitty, Edna Best, Filmmakers, François Truffaut, Ingrid Bergman, Leopoldine Konstantin, Linden Travers, Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Motion picture criticism, Motion picture directors & producers, Naunton Wayne, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Paul Lukas, The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), William Rothman, Works
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Abstract
When people die in Alfred Hitchcock's films, they tend to die in fairly extravagant ways. But what people have just witnessed is perhaps the most prototypical shot in all of Hitchcock's work, if not in all of cinema: the perspectival shot-countershot. The perspectival shot-countershot is what makes their search fundamentally legible. Yet in his later conspiracy films of the 1930s and 1940s, Hitchcock seems to have developed a different understanding of the kinds of recognitions that perspective allows. Here, White explores how to know that Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is a conspiracy film and where the conspiracy in Notorious be found.
