Hitchcock à la Carte

Hitchcock à la Carte PDF Author: Jan Olsson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well-documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million-dollar franchise's principal star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

Hitchcock à la Carte

Hitchcock à la Carte PDF Author: Jan Olsson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book

Book Description
Alfred Hitchcock: cultural icon, master film director, storyteller, television host, foodie. And as Jan Olsson argues in Hitchcock à la Carte, he was also an expert marketer who built his personal brand around his rotund figure and well-documented table indulgencies. Focusing on Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Olsson asserts that the success of Hitchcock's media empire depended on his deft manipulation of bodies and the food that sustained them. Hitchcock's strategies included frequently playing up his own girth, hiring body doubles, making numerous cameos, and using food—such as a frozen leg of lamb—to deliver scores of characters to their deaths. Constructing his brand enabled Hitchcock to maintain creative control, blend himself with his genre, and make himself the multi-million-dollar franchise's principal star. Olsson shows how Hitchcock's media brand management was a unique performance model that he used to mark his creative oeuvre as strictly his own.

Hitchcock's People, Places, and Things

Hitchcock's People, Places, and Things PDF Author: John Bruns
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810139979
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things argues that Alfred Hitchcock was as much a filmmaker of things and places as he was of people. Drawing on the thought of Bruno Latour, John Bruns traces the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents in Hitchcock’s films with the aim of mapping the Hitchcock landscape cognitively, affectively, and politically. Yet this book does not promise that such a map can or will cohere, for Hitchcock was just as adept at misdirection as he was at direction. Bearing this in mind and true to the Hitchcock spirit, Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things anticipates that people will stumble into the wrong places at the wrong time, places will be made uncanny by things, and things exchanged between people will act as (not-so) secret agents that make up the perilous landscape of Hitchcock’s work. This book offers new readings of well-known Hitchcock films, including The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, as well as insights into lesser-discussed films such as I Confess and Family Plot. Additional close readings of the original theatrical trailer for Psycho and a Hitchcock-directed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents expand the Hitchcock landscape beyond conventional critical borders. In tracing the network of relations in Hitchcock’s work, Bruns brings new Hitchcockian tropes to light. For students, scholars, and serious fans, the author promises a thrilling critical navigation of the Hitchcock landscape, with frequent “mental shake-ups” that Hitchcock promised his audience.

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense PDF Author: Edward White
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002409
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Biography An Economist Best Book of 2021 A fresh, innovative biography of the twentieth century’s most iconic filmmaker. In The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon—what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world. The book’s twelve chapters illuminate different aspects of Hitchcock’s life and work: “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up”; “The Murderer”; “The Auteur”; “The Womanizer”; “The Fat Man”; “The Dandy”; “The Family Man”; “The Voyeur”; “The Entertainer”; “The Pioneer”; “The Londoner”; “The Man of God.” Each of these angles reveals something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived but also the various versions of himself that he projected, and those projected on his behalf. From Hitchcock’s early work in England to his most celebrated films, White astutely analyzes Hitchcock’s oeuvre and provides new interpretations. He also delves into Hitchcock’s ideas about gender; his complicated relationships with “his women”—not only Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren but also his female audiences—as well as leading men such as Cary Grant, and writes movingly of Hitchcock’s devotion to his wife and lifelong companion, Alma, who made vital contributions to numerous classic Hitchcock films, and burnished his mythology. And White is trenchant in his assessment of the Hitchcock persona, so carefully created that Hitchcock became not only a figurehead for his own industry but nothing less than a cultural icon. Ultimately, White’s portrayal illuminates a vital truth: Hitchcock was more than a Hollywood titan; he was the definitive modern artist, and his significance reaches far beyond the confines of cinema.

Their Own Best Creations

Their Own Best Creations PDF Author: Annie Berke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520972023
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.

Hitchcock's Appetites

Hitchcock's Appetites PDF Author: Casey McKittrick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501339567
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

Simply Hitchcock

Simply Hitchcock PDF Author: David Sterritt
Publisher: Simply Charly
ISBN: 1943657297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
"David Sterritt is widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable, perceptive, and accessible commentators on Alfred Hitchcock’s career. He makes a convincing case for the charm, technical innovativeness, and often perverse wit of Hitchcock’s films and television shows while, at the same time, not shying away from exploring troubling aspects of his career. Relax with this delightful book and prepare for the illumination and sheer pleasure it delivers." —William Luhr, author of Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying and Professor of English at Saint Peter's University From Dial M for Murder and Vertigo to North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) made some of the most memorable thrillers in the history of cinema. Acclaimed for both his daring artistic innovations and his irrepressible showmanship, Hitchcock blended suspense, humor, and psychologically unsettling themes to create an extraordinary body of work. In Simply Hitchcock, author and movie critic David Sterritt explores the celebrated director’s entire career, from its beginnings in the British silent film industry to its glory days in Hollywood. He shows Hitchcock as a consummate artist who dealt with deep existential and psychological issues, as well as a mischievous prankster who loved playing tricks on the audience and never lost a chance to pull a dead rabbit out of a hat. With wit and erudition, Simply Hitchcock paints a comprehensive portrait of a brilliant and complex man, who not only made indelible films, but also succeeded in establishing himself as the most instantly recognizable movie director of all time.

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock PDF Author: Thomas Leitch
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444397311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
The most comprehensive volume ever published on Alfred Hitchcock, covering his career and legacy as well as the broader cultural and intellectual contexts of his work. Contains thirty chapters by the leading Hitchcock scholars Covers his long career, from his earliest contributions to other directors’ silent films to his last uncompleted last film Details the enduring legacy he left to filmmakers and audiences alike

Perpetual Movement

Perpetual Movement PDF Author: Neil Badmington
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484178
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The first book-length study in English of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Perpetual Movement offers both a production history that draws extensively upon little-known archival materials, including set drawings and drafts of the screenplay, and a close examination of the film in which Neil Badmington analyzes each of Rope's eleven shots. Writing in an accessible and engaging style, Badmington explores the film's treatment of space, sound, editing, sexuality, source material, design, intertexuality, narrative, and music. He looks at Hitchcock's struggle with censorship while planning, shooting, and distributing the film. Perpetual Movement also addresses Rope's reception and legacy, explaining why the film's unusual qualities provide such lasting appeal for viewers.

Stars and Silhouettes

Stars and Silhouettes PDF Author: Joceline Andersen
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814346928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Stars and Silhouettes: The History of the Cameo Role in Hollywood traces the history of the cameo as it emerged in twentieth-century cinema. Although the cameo has existed in film culture for over a century, Joceline Andersen explains that this role cannot be strictly defined because it exists as a constellation of interactions between duration and recognition, dependent on who is watching and when. Even audiences of the twenty-first century who are inundated by the lives of movie stars and habituated to images of their personal friends on screens continue to find cameos surprising and engaging. Cameos reveal the links between our obsession with celebrity and our desire to participate in the powerful cultural industries within contemporary society. Chapter 1 begins with the cameo’s precedents in visual culture and the portrait in particular—from the Vitagraph executives in the 1910s to the emergence of actors as movie stars shortly after. Chapter 2 explores the fan-centric desire for behind-the-scenes visions of Hollywood that accounted for the success of cameo-laden, Hollywood-set films that autocratic studios used to make their glamorous line-up of stars as visible as possible. Chapter 3 traces the development of the cameo in comedy, where cameos began to show not only glimpses of celebrities at their best but also of celebrities at their worst. Chapter 4 examines how the television guest spot became an important way for stars and studios to market both their films and stars from other media in trades that reflected an increasingly integrated mediascape. In Chapter 5, Andersen examines auteur cameos and the cameo as a sign of authorship. Director cameos reaffirm the fan’s interest in the film not just as a stage for actors but as a forum for the visibility of the director. Cameos create a participatory space for viewers, where recognizing those singled out among extras and small roles allows fans to demonstrate their knowledge. Stars and Silhouettes belongs on the shelf of every scholar, student, and reader interested in film history and star studies.

Crime a la Carte

Crime a la Carte PDF Author: Cynthia Manson
Publisher: Signet
ISBN: 9780451180520
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
A collection of nineteen stories includes the works of Agatha Christie, Joan Hess, Robert Barnard, and more as originally presented in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Original.