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Introduction David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer Hitchcock . . . T he half century or so of Alfred Hitchcock’s career spanned crucial eras in the history of world and, especially, Hollywood cinema: from the refinement of the silents’ ability to tell feature-length stories with images in the years before the coming of sound; to the reconfiguring of film style necessitated by the conversion to “talking pictures” a few years later; to the refinements, both narrative and visual, made in the so-called Classic Hollywood text during the 1930s and 40s; to the advent in the next decade of wide-screen cinematography (which required further adjustments to “corporate ” techniques); to the industry’s accommodation with its erstwhile rival, television; to the changes in the marketplace that followed in the wake of the weakening and eventual abandonment of the Production Code in 1966. Perhaps most important, however, Hitchcock’s impressive oeuvre of more than fifty feature films reflects the constant (and often unexpected) evolution of cinematic subject matter and treatment, broadly conceived—both the kind of stories the cinema chose to tell and also the manner of their telling. The conventions of Victorian melodrama that held sway in his youth made way for a succession of modern forms and practices of storytelling to which Hitchcock responded in a strongly individualistic fashion. Thus Hitchcock’s continually evolving approach to filmmaking, strongly influenced at the outset by German Expressionism, came to reflect not only several subsequent and distinct waves of realism, but also modernist and even postmodernist styles (the influence of the latter being quite evident in his last two projects). From his first silent features made in late-1920s Britain to his last post-studio production (1976) 2 introduction made in the United States, however, Hitchcock not only exemplified and reacted to changes in the cinema; he also affected the course these were to take. Of course, he was born too late (and arguably in the wrong country) to be an innovating pioneer on the model of a D. W. Griffith or Sergei Eisenstein. Yet like them, his film practice may be conceived as a dialectic that yokes entertainment and expressive forms of authorship. This instability of purpose and resulting rhetoric heavily marks his body of work and career. Specifically, any fair account of the medium’s first century must acknowledge the many ways in which Hitchcock helped sustain and further filmmaking as a commercial enterprise—and as a respected art form as well. It is thus hardly surprising that many aspects of Hitchcock’s accomplishments have received a good deal of attention in recent years, as film scholars have focused their attention less on the idealism and master schemes of subject positioning theory and more on delimited historical questions. Chief among such developing historicisms have been more nuanced forms of auteurist inquiry that, avoiding the distorting excesses of neoromanticism, have attained a substantial popularity on the current critical scene, as accounts of the careers of well-known directors have proliferated. The occasion of Hitchcock’s birth centenary in 1999 saw the publication of many important works, recalling the flurry of discussion his films received from the Cahiers and Movie critics nearly a half century earlier. Of course, the films, especially those made in Hollywood , have now been the subject of a constant stream of close theoretical and textual analysis for more than three decades. Scholarly interest in Hitchcock, we can affirm, is hardly slackening. In fact, his may well constitute the most discussed body of films ever made. Because it has focused on him for the most part, however, this valuable criticism has generally acknowledged only in passing his impact on other filmmakers , on genres and fashions, even on the field of cinema studies as an academic discipline. It is an often acknowledged, but as yet largely unexamined, fact that Hitchcock’s films have exerted, and continue to exert, a wider and more profound influence than those of any other director. One obvious sign of this has been that the term “Hitchcockian” has entered the international language of academicians and film publicists alike as a common way of referring to a certain kind of cinematic narrative characterized by heightened effects of “suspense,” the much-debated concept that Hitchcock co-opted to describe both his designs on the spectator’s emotions and his peculiar talent for engaging them. No other director has been accorded a similar linguistic honor. How did Hitchcock...

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