Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #734995 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Customer Reviews

Fascinating Insights
In this engaging and insightful study, Nicholas Haeffner explores Hitchcock's remarkable career and offers re-readings of his films which situate them in relation to a range of social, political and artistic contexts. Challenging previous studies which read Hitchcock's work predominantly through psychoanalysis, Haeffner examines the films in relation to cultural traditions, class and gender dynamics, and the systems and structures of the film industry itself.

In the initial chapters of the book, Haeffner considers Hitchcock's position as both artist and businessman, and emphasises his relentless self-promotion throughout his career. Using wide-ranging examples as well as quotes from Hitchcock himself taken from articles and reviews, Haeffner examines the director's challenges to traditional social mores, his commitment to experimentation and innovation, and his nurturing of the tastes of British and American audiences. A variety of key influences on Hitchcock are considered - including melodrama, the thriller, gothic, romance, expressionism and surrealism - and the visual and verbal artistry of his works is explored through detailed analysis of particular scenes.

Subsequent chapters focus on specific areas of Hitchcock's work and develop or challenge standard views and critical approaches. Chapter Four, for example, demonstrates how Hitchcock engaged not only with the traditions of gothic and romance for which he arguably most famous, but the conventions of realism as well, and particularly in The Wrong Man (1957), "the most self-consciously realist of all Hitchcock's films" (p. 61). Chapter Five complicates previous readings of Hitchcock's supposed misogyny through detailed consideration of the construction of women in his work. And Chapter Six similarly extends and complicates more standard Freudian readings of the films through an examination of the problems and potential of psychoanalytic analysis. A very interesting chapter on Hitchcock's relations with, and manipulation of, his audiences is then followed by a final chapter exploring the genesis, reception and appropriation of Psycho (1960), one of the most enduring of Hitchcock's works and a film which, in Haeffner's words, "remains a testimony to his skills as an engineer of human unease and terror" (p. 111).

Overall, then, this is an accessible, fascinating and elegantly written study which provides many insightful readings and which sends the reader back to the films with renewed appreciation. Certainly it has much to offer students, scholars and fans of Hitchcock as well as those working in the areas of film studies and cultural studies more generally.

A Fresh Take on Hitchcock
There have been innumerable critical books written about Alfred Hitchcock. Some of them have been dim and shallow, others opaque and jargon-written, and still others like Nick Haeffner's book are critically penetrating,knowlegeable, and written with consummate clarity.
Haeffner emphasizes that Hitchcock's work needs to be "situated within the industrial imperatives and constraints that govern the film industry," and that they also need to be placed in a cultural context. Reading widely and astutely in the critical literature, Haeffner writes about how Hitchcock combined cultural respectabilty and sensationalism to help develop a British mifddlebrow cinema in such films as The 39 Steps. And how he successfully merged the roles of artist and showman to simultaneously garner recognition among intellectuals and appeal to a mass audience.
Haeffner's book is comprehensive and concise. He deals with subjects like: Hitchcock and women; his use of sound and silence, and the nature of audience response to the films. The book is unique for being thoroughly immersed in the academic literature, and accessible to the educated, non-specialist reader. It's a fine book.