Hitchcock: Centenary Essays

If you're looking for more information about the films, versatility, and lasting impact of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock: Centenary Essays should sate your hunger. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Hitchcock's birth, editors Richard Allen and S. Ishi Gonzales have assembled a collection of essays that cover not only the gamut of Hitchcock's movies, but also their continuing importance in today's culture. Acclaimed critics and theorists like Slavoj Zizek, Peter Wollen, Brigitte Peucker, William Rothman, Susan White, Raymond Bellour, and Lee Edelman contribute essays on famous films like Vertigo, Psycho, and The Thirty-Nine Steps, as well as lesser-known works like Stage Fright, Rope, Foreign Correspondent, and Marnie.

The book also covers Hitchcock's status as the "master of suspense," his forays into the genre of film noir, his interest in painting and sculpture, his humor, and his vision of the future. (It even offers a chapter somewhat mysteriously entitled "The Hitchcockian Blot.") "This centenary," the editors write, "provides us with the ideal occasion to consider the nature of Hitchcock's achievement as a filmmaker, the relationship between the artist and the authorial persona he partially (and ingeniously) manufactured, and the relationship of the director's work to the larger political and economic forces that shaped it. It also happens to coincide with the end of the twentieth century.... We would like to suggest that Hitchcock is the century's exemplary artist." --Raphael Shargel