Hitchcock's Romantic Irony

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by Richard Allen

Type: Studies
Subject: Director > Alfred Hitchcock
Keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, romance
Publishing date: 2007
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Collection: Film and Culture
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 328 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-231-13574-0

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Book Presentation:
Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed. Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.

About the Author:
Richard Allen is professor and chair of cinema studies at New York University. He is the author of numerous essays on Hitchcock, coeditor of two anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays and Hitchcock: Past and Future, and with Sidney Gottlieb he edits the Hitchcock Annual for Wallflower Press. Richard Allen is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of Projecting Illusion (Cambridge, 1995) and co-editor of four anthologies Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (BFI 1999), Wittgenstein, Theory and The Arts (Routledge, 2001), Camera Obscura/Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam, 2003). He is also editor (with Sid Gottlieb) of the Hitchcock Annual, a journal of Hitchcock Studies.

Press Reviews:
Tough but rewarding. Empire (four star review)

In-depth, insightful... Highly recommended. CHOICE

Comprehensive and gracefully conceived. Michael Richardson, Cineaste

[Allen's] knowledge of Hitchcock's films is impressive. Times Literary Supplement

Carefully researched and artfully written... critics will be tracing the ramifications of Hitchcock's romantic irony for a long time to come. David Sterritt, Film Quarterly

See the publisher website: Columbia University Press

See the complete filmography of Alfred Hitchcock on the website: IMDB ...

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