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.

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

Get Book Here

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.

Hitch

Hitch PDF Author: John Russell Taylor
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1448211611
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
This biography of Alfred Hitchcock is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any of his classic films. 'The best book yet about the movies' most famous director' Publisher's Weekly 'No one will ever top Hitch' Jimmy Stewart One of cinema's greatest directors, a virtuoso visual artist, and a genius of the suspense genre, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) is universally known for such masterpieces as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. But he was also a famously difficult and complex man, prone to arguing with studios and stars alike. In writing this biography, John Russell Taylor, a distinguished film critic and friend of Hitchcock's, enjoyed his full cooperation. Based on numerous interviews, with photos from the private family albums, and an in-depth study of the making of his last film, this biography of the director is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any Hitchcock classic.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock PDF Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062028642
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light is the definitive biography of the Master of Suspense and the most widely recognized film director of all time. In a career that spanned six decades and produced more than 60 films – including The 39 Steps, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds – Alfred Hitchcock set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling. Acclaimed biographer Patrick McGilligan re-examines his life and extraordinary work, challenging perceptions of Hitchcock as the “macabre Englishman” and sexual obsessive, and reveals instead the ingenious craftsman, trickster, provocateur, and romantic. With insights into his relationships with Hollywood legends – such as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly – as well as his 54-year marriage to Alma Reville and his inspirations in the thriller genre, the book is full of the same dark humor, cliffhanger suspense, and revelations that are synonymous with one of the most famous and misunderstood figures in cinema.

Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie

Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie PDF Author: Tony Lee Moral
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810891085
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
After a decade of successful films that included Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock produced Marnie, an apparent artistic failure and an unquestionable commercial disappointment. Over the decades, however, the film’s reputation has undergone a reevaluation, and both critics and fans alike have come to appreciate Marnie’s many qualities. In Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, Tony Lee Moral investigates the cultural and political factors governing the 1964 film’s production, the causes of its critical and commercial failure, and Marnie’s relevance for today’s artists and filmmakers. Hitchcock’s style, motivation, and fears regarding the film are well-documented in this examination of one of his most undervalued efforts. Moral uses extensive research, including personal interviews with Tippi Hedren and Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano—as well as unpublished excerpts from interviews with Hitchcock himself—to delve into the issues surrounding the film’s production and release. This revised edition features four new chapters that provide even more fascinating insights into the film’s production and Hitchcock’s working methods. Biographies of Winston Graham—the author of the novel on which the film is based—and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen provide clues into how they brought a feminist viewpoint to Marnie. Additional material addresses Hitchcock’s unrealized project Mary Rose and his efforts to bring it to the screen, the director’s visual style and subjective approach to Marnie, and an exploration of the “real” Alfred Hitchcock. The book also addresses criticisms of the director following the HBO television movie The Girl, which depicted the filming of Marnie. With newly obtained access to the Hitchcock Collection Production Archives at the Margaret Herrick Library, the files of Jay and Lewis Allen, and the memoirs of Winston Graham—as well as interviews in 2012 with the Hitchcock crew—this new edition of Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie provides an invaluable look behind the scenes of a film that has finally been recognized for its influence and vision. It contains more than thirty photos, including a storyboard sequence for the film.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385537425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Alfred Hitchcock rigorously controlled his public image, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring out all others. In this gripping short biography, Peter Ackroyd wrests the director’s chair back from the master of control to reveal a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashed a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. Iconic film stars make cameo appearances throughout Hitchcock’s story, just as the director did in his own films: Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart and, perhaps most famously of all, Tippi Hedren, who endures cuts and bruises from a fearsome flock of real birds. Perceptive and intelligent, Alfred Hitchcock is a fascinating look at one of the most revered directors of the twentieth century.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock PDF Author: Richard Allen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 183871426X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
This collection of essays displays the range and breadth of Hitchcock scholarship and assesses the significance of his body of work as a bridge between the fin de siecle culture of the 19th century and the 20th century. It engages with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations.

The Tastemaker

The Tastemaker PDF Author: Edward White
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374708819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.Edward White's biography—the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality—depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel—and especially its title—infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste—modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression—created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.

The Hitchcock Murders

The Hitchcock Murders PDF Author: Peter Conrad
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571210602
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Alfred Hitchcock relished his power to frighten us and believed the shocks he administered improved our psychological health. But he could never satisfactorily explain our curiosity to see forbidden things or the perverse desire to experience anxiety and dread that made his work so popular. In The Hitchcock Murders, Peter Conrad, one of Hitchcock's eager victims, undertakes the task on the master's behalf. At the age of thirteen, Conrad snuck into his first screening of Psycho, and he's been wary of showers and fruit cellars ever since. Thanks to Hitchcock, he's also suspicious of staircases, seagulls, and crop-dusting planes. Now he sets out to analyze the nature of Hitchcock's appeal to both himself and the millions of moviegoers for whom Hitchcock is cinema's foremost auteur. Examining Hitchcock's use of religion, morality, conscience, culpability, and literary symbols, Conrad unveils a chilling Nietzschean universe-one in which there is no God and no moral standard, where humans are petty and disposable and the neutral hand of fate can take a life in the blink of an eye. A timid, respectable man with the imagination of a psychopath, a chubby jester whose practical jokes took merciless advantage of human insecurities, Hitchcock is revealed here as the man who knew too much-about all of us.

Garbo

Garbo PDF Author: Robert Gottlieb
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720819
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Esquire's 125 best books about Hollywood Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her. “Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams.” Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world’s subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world—and that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed—was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe’s. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood, aged nineteen, she spoke barely a word of English and was completely unprepared for the ferocious publicity that quickly adhered to her as, almost overnight, she became the world’s most famous actress. In Garbo, the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the attention of the world—her desperate, futile striving to be “left alone.” He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-M’s early presentation of her as a “vamp”—her overwhelming beauty drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathed—to the artistic heights of Camille and Ninotchka (“Garbo Laughs!”), by way of Anna Christie (“Garbo Talks!”), Mata Hari, and Grand Hotel. He examines her passive withdrawal from the movies, and the endless attempts to draw her back. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy woman in New York—“a hermit about town”—and the life she led in Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill. Her relationships with her famous co-star John Gilbert, with Cecil Beaton, with Leopold Stokowski, with Erich Maria Remarque, with George Schlee—were they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she sexual at all? The whole world wanted to know—and still wants to know. In addition to offering his rich account of her life, Gottlieb, in what he calls “A Garbo Reader,” brings together a remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people’s memoirs and interviews, ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah Bankhead to Roland Barthes; from literature (she turns up everywhere—in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas); from countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures—250 or so ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing snapshots—all reproduced here in superb duotone. She had no personal vanity, no interest in clothes and make-up, yet the story of Garbo is essentially the story of a face and the camera. Forty years after her career ended, she was still being tormented by unrelenting paparazzi wherever she went. Includes Black-and-White Photographs

Not Go Away Is My Name

Not Go Away Is My Name PDF Author: Alberto Ríos
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619322242
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Resistance and persistence collide in Alberto Rios’s sixteenth book, Not Go Away Is My Name, a book about past and present, changing and unchanging, letting go and holding on. The borderline between Mexico and the U.S. looms large, and Ríos sheds light on and challenges our sensory experiences of everyday objects. At the same time, family memories and stories of the Sonoron desert weave throughout as Ríos travels in duality: between places, between times, and between lives. In searching for and treasuring what ought to be remembered, Ríos creates an ode to family life, love and community, and realizes “All I can do is not go away. / Not go away is my name.”