Reassessing the Hitchcock Touch

Industry, Collaboration, and Filmmaking

Wieland Schwanebeck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319600079
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319600086
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume is dedicated to the elusive category of the Hitchcock Touch, the qualities and techniques which had manifested in Alfred Hitchcock's own films yet which cannot be limited to the realm of Hitchcockian cinema alone. While the first section of this collection focuses on Hitchcock's own films and the various people who made important artistic contributions to them, the subsequent chapters draw wider circles. Case studies focusing on the branding effects associated with Hitchcockian cinema and its seductive qualities highlight the paratextual dimension of his films and the importance of his well-publicized persona, while the final section addresses both Hitchcock's formative period, as well as other filmmakers who drew upon the Hitchcock Touch. The collection not only serves as an introduction to the field of Hitchcock scholarship for a wider audience, it also delivers in-depth assessments of the lesser-known early period of his career, in addition to providing new takes on canonical films like Vertigo (1958) and Frenzy (1972).

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editor and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introducing the Hitchcock Touch
• Part I Hitchcock’s Films
• Chapter 2 Facing the Past as Well as the Future: Music and Sound in Hitchcock’s Early British Sound Films
• Chapter 3 Between Caméra Stylo and the Making of Images: Hitchcock’s Cinematographers
• Chapter 4 Hitchcock’s Plotting
• Chapter 5 Hitchcock’s Brunettes: Visualizing Queerness in the 1940s and 1950s
• Chapter 6 Gazing and Constructing: Imag(in)ing Madeleine in Vertigo
• Part II The Paratextual Environment
• Chapter 7 “If I Won’t Be Myself, Who Will?” The Making of a Star Persona in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
• Chapter 8 Alfred Hitchcock: Cinematic Seducer Frenzy and the Seduction Theory of Film
• Chapter 9 The Visual Peak: Saul Bass as Hitchcock’s ‘Pictorial Consultant’
• Chapter 10 Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators Series
• Part III Beyond Hitchcock
• Chapter 11 Jack of All Trades: Alfred Hitchcock’s Apprenticeship in Neubabelsberg, 1924/25
• Chapter 12 Hitchcock—Powell—Ford
• Chapter 13 Uncommon Dangers: Alfred Hitchcock and the Literary Contexts of the British Spy Thriller
• Chapter 14 Jaws: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Filmography
• Index