The Camera Lies

Acting for Hitchcock

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by Dan Callahan

Type: Studies
Subject: Director > Alfred Hitchcock
Keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, actors, acting
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 272 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-751532-7

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Book Presentation:
• Draws upon a wealth of rarely-seen material on Hitchcock, including obscure interviews
• Offers a new and visceral understanding of what Hitchcock's actors convey on screen
• First book on Hitchcock to focus exclusively on his work with actors

Alfred Hitchcock is said to have once remarked, "Actors are cattle," a line that has stuck in the public consciousness ever since. For Hitchcock, acting was a matter of contrast and counterpoint, valuing subtlety and understatement over flashiness. He felt that the camera was duplicitous, and directed actors to look and act conversely. In The Camera Lies, author Dan Callahan spotlights the many nuances of Hitchcock's direction throughout his career, from Cary Grant in Notorious (1946) to Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). Delving further, he examines the ways that sex and sexuality are presented through Hitchcock's characters, reflecting the director's own complex relationship with sexuality.

Detailing the fluidity of acting - both what it means to act on film and how the process varies in each actor's career - Callahan examines the spectrum of treatment and direction Hitchcock provided well- and lesser-known actors alike, including Ingrid Bergman, Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Robert Walker, Jessica Tandy, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren. As Hitchcock believed, the best actor was one who could "do nothing well" - but behind an outward indifference to his players was a sophisticated acting theorist who often drew out great performances. The Camera Lies unpacks Hitchcock's legacy both as a director who continuously taught audiences to distrust appearance, and as a man with an uncanny insight into the human capacity for deceit and misinterpretation.

About the Author:
Dan Callahan, Freelance Writer Dan Callahan is the author of Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave, The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960, and The Art of American Screen Acting, 1960 to Today. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and many other publications.

Press Reviews:
"Callahan's commentary is chatty, opinionated, engaging, provocative, and fun, and The Camera Lies will provide tonic stimulation to readers." - Thomas Leitch, Hitchcock Annual

"Dan Callahan's The Camera Lies reminds us that Hitchcock Studies are far from complete. With rigorous research, sharp critical analysis, and lively prose Callahan delivers a fresh turn on the director's engagement with and relationship to the actor. At once a figure crucial to his filmmaking as well as a figure resonant with his playful, astute, and sometimes vexing personality, Hitchcock's actor reveals a performance theory executed on the screen quite like no other." - David A. Gerstner, Professor of Cinema Studies, College of Staten Island

"This book is two things Hitchcock loved: a train, hitting every consecutive stop of an unmatched career, taking welcome, provocative pauses in out-of-the-way stations; and a dream, unfolding in singular style, full of unexpected visions and intuitive leaps, springing delicious surprises from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence." - Nick Davis, Associate Professor of English, Northwestern University

"Just when such a thing no longer seems possible, here is a fresh, groundbreaking approach to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, centered on the most neglected aspect of his practice — his work with actors. Dan Callahan, writing with grace and wit and no trace of academic jargon, reveals why Hitchcock is more than the sum of his storyboards.Contrary to Hitchcock's self-created image, Callahan presents an artist fully engaged with the connotations of casting and the details of performance." - Dave Kehr, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art

"It is a pleasure to read Dan Callahan's encyclopedic study of Alfred Hitchcock's direction of actors. This is not only because he writes so deftly on matters of the human figure in cinema. But also because Callahan's particular achievement in this work is the skillful articulation of an appreciation that is underpinned by a deeply empathic response to all the humans, including Hitchcock himself, who composed the director's pictures across a very long career." - Professor Catherine Grant, Birkbeck, University of London

"Dan Callahan takes Alfred Hitchcock's often-retold quip that 'all actors should be treated like cattle,' and shapes the one-liner into a cohesive thesis about the kind of performance that best suited that old master's aims...(Callahan's) observations are bright, often wry. He is also keenly - nay, insistently - interested in the sexuality of the players, both expressed and hidden." - New York Times

"Callahan is the Plutarch of American film critics." - Los Angeles Review of Books

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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

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