Modernism Modernity (2015) - Hitchcock's Underground
Details
- journal article: Hitchcock's Underground
- author(s): David Pike
- journal: Modernism Modernity (2015)
- issue: volume 22, issue 1, pages 125-151
- DOI: 10.1353/mod.2015.0004
- journal ISSN: 1071-6068
- publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- keywords: Infrastructure, Modernism, Motion picture directors & producers
Links
Abstract
What is noteworthy is the director himself identifying the hobby in retrospect as an early sign of a modernist artistic temperament (he would similarly assert that "his only clear memory of Leytonstone was 'the Saturday night when the first electric tram made its maiden journey' down the streets . . . in 1906"). Hitchcock, who by his teens had come to pride himself on his knowledge of the high culture of modernism, would have been well aware in describing his childhood years that reading timetables as literature was a typical aesthetic move of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. This is neither Ruttmann's vision of the modern city as a perfectly synchronized machine-a symphony-nor is it Lang's vision of the modern city as Moloch consuming its alienated inhabitants.
