Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2012) - A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock
Details
- book review: A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock
- author(s): Stephen B. Armstrong
- journal: Quarterly Review of Film and Video (01/Dec/2012)
- issue: volume 29, issue 5, page 458
- journal ISSN: 1050-9208
- publisher: Harwood Academic Publishers
- keywords: "A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock" - edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague, Alexander Doty, Alfred Hitchcock, Angelo Restivo, Bernard Herrmann, Book reviews, Books, Claude Chabrol, David O. Selznick, David Sterritt, François Truffaut, George Toles, I Confess (1953), Janet Bergstrom, Ken Mogg, Leland Poague, Marnie (1964), Murray Pomerance, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Rebecca (1940), Robin Wood, Rope (1948), Sabotage (1936), Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), Thomas M. Leitch, Transatlantic Pictures, Under Capricorn (1949), Vertigo (1958), Éric Rohmer
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Abstract
Article
A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague.
STEPHEN B. ARMSTRONG
Over a career that stretched from the 1920s to the 1970s, Alfred Hitchcock directed 53 features films and nearly two dozen television programs, leaving behind an enormous amount of material for critics and scholars to investigate. In turn, Hitchcock and his creative output have been the subject of thousands of articles and books, as well as several documentaries, since his death in 1980. Explaining the director's persistent popularity is not particularly difficult. His films still appeal to general audiences with their humor and intrigue, while their thematic complexity continues to generate competing, often contradictory, interpretations from academics.
All the same, does the world really need another book about the Master of Suspense? In their introduction to A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, a new anthology of 30 previously unpublished essays, editors Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague wonder along the same lines. “[W]hy do we extend the list [of Hitchcock essay collections] with still another volume?” they ask (2). But the editors, perhaps wisely, avoid answering this question and choose, instead, to emphasize how their anthology distinguishes itself from others of its sort:
The present collection extends the tradition of anthologies that have sought to characterize Hitchcock studies by providing a retrospective snapshot, a time capsule of the debates that have shaped Hitchcock scholarship. But it differs from earlier collections in…important ways. The most obvio...
