![]() Proceedings, thus deliberately upsetting and perverting audience expectations. The time – as in his decision to “kill off the star” (Janet Leigh) early in the Someīorn of his 1950s work in TV, take bold steps beyond the screen conventions of He works with (and often gets around) playfully, ingeniously, inventively. The convention of the Happy Ending, and so on. In specific ways in relation to formulaic plots (all, at some level, borrowedįrom previous movies and works of fiction in other media), the greatĪctor-stars (Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly) and their given personae, In terms of elaboration, Hitchcock positions himself Relationships (love and hate, desire and aggression) questions of moral guiltĪnd responsibility: who is the guilty one, and guilty of what? Can the guiltyīe somehow redeemed, forgiven, absolved? Or must they be more violently Power-plays and the fundamental ambivalence of human (especially romantic) Among these elements: a physical journey orĭisplacement a problem of identity: who am I to myself and others? antagonism, Tend toward the repetition/variation of particular types of plots, events, In the case of Hitchcock, it’s clear that his films Production process a director could or could not control). Or stylistic treatment, or both – much depends on how much of the total Underplay, emphasise or suppress (whether this happens on the level of script, The director organises the elaboration of certain movie formulae, or generic elements: what they overplay and Material – and its ongoing variations from one film to the next. So how can we “find” a film author in their work, whatĪre the traces, the marks, the inflections we need to see? First, repetition: distinctive, recurrent Generalities will never get us very far into what is truly cinematic – and These various themes, attitudes and sensibilities. The level of grasping how the style or form of the films materially express And, as soon as we possibly can, we must get to Particular things happen in particular ways. Thematic material, an overall attitude toward what is presented (and hence, usually, the reality beyond film), and a Or a godhead) is all about locating recurring Using auteurism as a critical, investigative method (beyond some bland, mindlessĪssertion of “the director as superstar” – the title of a 1970 interview book – Is a great example of someone whose work completely fills the in-between space, In fact, the critical movement we know as auteurism (auteur = author) is, in large part, devoted to exactly this quest. Personal expression or inflectionĬan happen even when everything in a film seems culturally “given” in advance. Possibilities they define as extreme poles. Mutually exclusive – we can work in-between them, or back-and-forth across the ![]() Naturally, we should aim not to treat these options as Larger than themselves (eg., Alfred Hitchcock as acme of the patriarchalĬulture of the voyeuristic “male gaze” Hitchcock as Classic Hollywood etc.). Something innately personal, as sum up or epitomise those fields that are Tendencies, social problems here, a film author does not so much express Second, dissolving the individual intoĮverything that surrounds him or her: the contemporaneous conventions, cultural Uniqueness, granting them an absolute autonomy: an author’s movies refer toĮach other, creating their own world enclosed in and by a particular artistic vision. How can we construct the figure of an author in film? There are two broadįirst, abstracting the individual in his or her When ex-Screen editor Sam Rohdie read them, heĭrily commented to me in the NFTA foyer: “When film theory appears in publicityīlurbs like these, it’s time to start writing something else”. Program notes for the National Film Theatre of Australia’s Hitchcock season Hitchcock was (and still is today) a constant point of reference the lecture It was a time of my life when I was stillĮxcitedly discovering (and applying) the film theory, “structuralist semiotics”Īnd textual analysis protocols bequeathed by the 1960s & ‘70s, areas where Served as a tutor in Rob Jordan’s 1 st year film course, which I have no definite memory or record of whenĪnd where the following talk on Shadow of a Doubt (combined here with a preceding introductory lecture) was delivered,īut I suspect it may have been at RMIT during 1981, during the time that I In that period, my lecture commissionsĬovered a curious random assortment of films, including Tout va bien (1972), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Mother and the Whore (1973), Angel City (1976), and Rear Institute of Technology, and Swinburne Technical College – all these names Gave my first, occasional, invited lectures in cinema courses at threeĭifferent tertiary institutions (Melbourne State College, Royal Melbourne Introduction (January 2021): Between 19 – and the ages of 19 and 21 – I
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