The Chronicle of Higher Education (1999) - We are all Hitchcock's children
Details
- article: We are all Hitchcock's children
- author(s): Thomas Doherty
- journal: The Chronicle of Higher Education (06/Aug/1999)
- issue: volume 45, issue 48, page B6
- journal ISSN: 0009-5982
- keywords: "Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation" - by Robert E Kapsis, "The Women Who Knew Too Much" - by Tania Modleski, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV), Alfred Hitchcock, Andrew Sarris, Blackmail (1929), Bodega Bay, California, British Film Institute, Cahiers du Cinéma, Camille Paglia, Daphne du Maurier, David O. Selznick, Eva Marie Saint, François Truffaut, Ingrid Bergman, Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Laura Mulvey, Lifeboat (1944), Motion picture directors & producers, Motion pictures, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Pauline Kael, Popularity, Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Rebecca (1940), Robert E. Kapsis, Robert Walker, Salvador Dalí, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Strangers on a Train (1951), Tania Modleski, The 39 Steps (1935), The Birds (1963), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Pleasure Garden (1925), Tippi Hedren, Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
One hundred years after the birth of the best-known director on the planet, Doherty recounts Alfred Hitchcock's legacy and explains his hold over the popular imagination.
Article
We are all Hitchcock's children
The films are indelible, the surname is adjectival, and the silhouette of the portly profile is instantly recognizable. Nearly two decades after his death, Alfred Hitchcock still towers over American cinema. Like other geniuses of the motion-picture medium — D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and F.W. Murnau — Hitchcock bequeathed not just a list of screen masterpieces but a lexicon for the language of film. Today, at the cineplex or on television, he calls the shots for the vistas of spectatorship: the dreamy, roving camera work; the unnerving jump cuts in editing; above all, the guilty pleasures of undetected surveillance, the eyeline match that locks the hungry voyeur to the object of the gaze. No wonder the centennial of Hitchcock's birth (August 13) is being celebrated with a ceremonial flourish that would befit a Founding Father. A raft of critical studies and commemorative books has been published to tie in with the anniversary. (Best of the lot: a thin-but-brilliant volume by the cultural critic Camille Paglia on The Birds, for the British Film Institute.) The Museum of Modern Art is screening a complete run of Hitchcock's 53 films, and the Museum of Television and Radio is mounting a retrospective of his television work. New prints of such Hitchcock classics as Rear Window (1954) and North by Northwest (1959) are slated for re-release in theaters. In October, a star-studded conference at New York University will bring togeth...
Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University and author of "Pre‑Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930‑1934" (Columbia University Press 1999)
