In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral--if not amoral or immoral--world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker's moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.
Author(s): R. Barton Palmer, Homer B. Pettey, Steven M. Sanders
Series: Horizons of Cinema
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 342
City: Albany
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
An Unrivaled Figure
A Philosophical Filmmaker
Hitchcock and Catholicism
Moralism, Not Moralizing
I Confess: What We Say, Whom We Tell
Notes
Works Cited
Skepticism
1. Jealousy and Trust in The Lodger
Factual and Fictional Sources for the Film
Hitchcock and Stannard’s Script
Jealousy and Trust in the Film
Postscript
Works Cited and Consulted
2. Fun with Suspicion
Works Cited
3. Heroic Satans and Other Hitchcockian Heresies
Notes
Works Cited
4. “Guilt, Confession, and … Then What?”: The Paradine Case and Under Capricorn
Note
Works Cited
5. The Forgotten Cigarette Lighter and Other Moral Accidents in Strangers on a Train
Works Cited
Immorality
6. Hitchcock’s Immoralists
Matters of Morality
Three Immoralist Perspectives
Two Immoralists
Why Be Moral?
Morality and Rationality
Morality and Advantage
Self and Others
How to Do Things with Hitch
Notes
Works Cited
7. Hitchcock the Amoralist: Rear Window and the Pleasures and Dangers of Looking
Note
Works Cited
8. Voyeurism Revisited
Defining Voyeurism
Cine-voyeurism
The Fictional Voyeur
Rear Window Ethics
Note
Works Cited
Moralizing
9. Alfred Hitchcock as Moralist
Wrong Men
Natural Expression
A Surface Life
Morality in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Lodging in Guilt
Note
Works Cited and Consulted
10. The Deepening Moralism of The Wrong Man
Notes
Works Cited
11. Hitchcock and the Philosophical End of Film
Danto on the End of Art
Danto and the Philosophical End of Film
Deleuze on Hitchcock
Keaton’s Spectator Cinema
Rear Window and Sherlock Jr.
Two Forms of Film Dialectic
Psycho
North by Northwest
Rope
The Birds
After the End of Film
Note
Works Cited
Moral Acts
12. The Dread of Ascent: The Moral and Spiritual Topography of Vertigo
Therapeutic Dead-Ends
Psychological Adolescence
Symptomatic Conflicts Out of the Past
The False Mirror of Possibility
Circles of Futility
Notes
Works Cited
13. The Philosophy of Marriage in North by Northwest
Notes
Works Cited
14. “The Loyalty of an Eel”: Issues of Political, Personal, and Professional Morality in (and around) Torn Curtain
Works Cited
15. Hobbes, Hume, and Hitchcock: The Case of Frenzy
Notes
Works Cited
Bibliography
Alfred Hitchcock Selected Filmography
Films, as director (listed chronologically)
Television Series
Contributors
Index
