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In One Shot Hitchcock, some of the best writers and thinkers in film studies have taken up the challenge of writing about a single shot from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Fifteen of Hitchcock's most engaging, horrifying, beautiful, sexual, and bizarre shots are interrogated and loved. Single shots are looked at from multiple angles, considering its importance for the film in question, and for other ways we can think about the cinema. This book is not only for people who enjoy watching and discussing Hitchcock's films, but for those who wish to discover new ways of writing about the films they love.
List of contents
- 1. One Shot: Hitchcock's Crime Scenes
- Luke Robinson and Melanie Robson
- 2. The Lodger (1927): Contaminating British silent cinema
- Sebastian Smoli¿ski
- 3. The Manxman (1929): Written on the water: Hitchcock's dissolving ink
- Tom Gunning
- 4. Sabotage (1936): A thriller and its aftereffects
- Helen Hughes
- 5. Rebecca (1940): The impure object of vision
- Bruce Isaacs
- 6. Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Performing a murder(er)
- Melanie Robson
- 7. Aventure Malgache (1944): French colonial tensions
- Charles Barr
- 8. Rope (1948): Chromatic design and neon light
- Sarah Street
- 9. Rear Window (1954): Intermedialities of peeping in the plural
- Martin P. Rossouw
- 10. To Catch a Thief (1955): Stanley Cavell and the end of a conventional myth
- Susana Viegas
- 11. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956): Hitchcock remakes himself in Hollywood
- Megan Carrigy
- 12. The Wrong Man (1956): Towards singularity
- Noa Steimatsky
- 13. Vertigo (1958): Labor in a single shot
- Domietta Torlasco
- 14. The Birds (1963): Trauma and the right of reply
- Julian Murphet
- 15. Marnie (1964): Restroom
- Jodi Brooks
- 16. Frenzy (1972): Pulling focus between a woman's face and a face of death
- Luke Robinson
- Index
About the author
Luke Robinson is Casual Academic at the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales Sydney and University of Technology Sydney.
Melanie Robson is Adjunct Lecturer at the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales Sydney
Summary
In recent years, the enduring appeal of Alfred Hitchcock to film studies has been evidenced by the proliferation of innovative approaches to the director's work. Adding to this pattern of innovation, the edited collection One Shot Hitchcock: A Contemporary Approach to the Screen utilizes formal analysis to interrogate key single shots from across Alfred Hitchcock's long career. This collection reveals the value of analyzing the single shot - within this small, cinematic unit is a code that unlocks a series of revelations about cinema as an artistic practice and a theoretical study. Each chapter examines one shot from a single film, beginning with The Lodger (1927) and ending with Frenzy (1972).
If Hitchcock is known as a director of suspense films and films about murder, the shots discussed in One Shot Hitchcock are his crime scenes. These are the shots that resist being forgotten, that repeatedly demand to be investigated, in which Hitchcock's influence on aesthetics and culture is at its most acute. Each chapter uses a different lens of film analysis - transnationalism, gender and sexuality, performance, history, affect, intermediality, remake studies, philosophy, and film form are all used to interrogate single shots. In these essays, the single shot from Hitchcock's film not only illustrates the approach in question but also demonstrates how the single shot encourages us to rethink our approaches to the screen. By reinvigorating a close formal mode of analysis, One Shot Hitchcock asks readers to think differently about film, offering a renewed assessment of Hitchcock's oeuvre in the process.
