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Acknowledgments
- Wayne State University Press
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This book incurred its greatest obligations at the beginning and end of its creation. The late Steve Rosen of St. Peter’s (New Jersey) telephoned me one memorable day to suggest that I might find the multitude of ideas in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power well suited to the study of film. Like most Americans, I had scarcely heard of Canetti; but when I opened that volume, I found a conception of the world in which not only film but everything else human appeared clarified and more deeply coherent. At the end of the work that led to this study, Barry Grant of Brock University suggested that I add a chapter on populist comedy and that I organize the chapters into broad sections according to general topics, both of which I did. Neither Steve nor Barry—need I add?—are in the least responsible for the misuses to which I may have put their ideas; the faults and foolishness that escaped the eyes of other readers, to whom I also owe considerable debts, are mine alone. Among those readers, the most influential—in this as in most things—is Megan Parry, a penetrating and tactful editor. George Toles offered sustaining encouragement along most of the route that led me to this point. Jim and Sue Palmer, as always, were generous and perceptive in reading the chapters I inflicted on them, and a number of anonymous readers of various drafts for Wayne State University Press offered carefully considered, useful suggestions for additions and corrections. My gifted professor of German and colleague at Wayne State, Alfred Cobbs, led a middle-aged student of no particular talent into the lovely language in which Canetti wrote, enabling me to catch glimpses of the flights of Canetti’s originals—which is not to denigrate Carol Stewart’s essential (for me) translation of Masse und Macht. The director of Wayne State University Press, Jane Hoehner, and acquisitions editor Annie Martin have been steadfastly confident in the potential of this study; I am deeply grateful to them. Maya Rhodes and John Crowley assisted in the making of the frame captures that illustrate some of my arguments. Eric Schramm has been a judicious copyvii Acknowledgments ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii editor. An earlier, somewhat different version of the chapter on North by Northwest appeared in Arizona Quarterly, and a half-dozen pages of the writing on The Silence of the Lambs are scheduled to appear in a chapter on that film in After Hitchcock, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. The overwhelming influence of Elias Canetti on the study that follows is obvious; I hope that my appropriations of some of the ideas of that curious, formidable, playful Dichter are not entirely unworthy of him. ...