"Hitchcock's Films Revisited", Robin Wood

Robin Wood (1931-2009) was a critic and founder of the film magazine CineAction, a journal also dedicated to a radical political agenda of socialism, feminism, Marxism, and gay rights. Author of several monographs around filmmakers such as Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman, his literary work emphasizes the consistent and individual vision that each director puts on his films. His critical career began with the publication of the article Psychanalyse de «Psycho»  for Cahiers du Cinéma. His texts show an authorial approach similar to that of the French film magazine, but later on, they focused on semiotic and poststructuralist theories. 

Hitchcock’s Films was one of the first books (and the first full-length study in English) on filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. Originally published in the 60s, under the influence of auteurist criticism, Wood later returned to it in the 80s to make Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, with new essays that reflected his development as a film critic influenced by Marxism and feminism, while revisiting and commenting his original texts, using also his personal experiences as well as his considerations on patriarchal / capitalist values that are present in classic Hollywood films. The considerations on sexuality, morality and psychoanalytical theories in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, discussing also its cinematographic aspects (mise en scène, editing…), makes this book, possibly, still the most important critical study on the master, providing intelligent and passionate answers for that unforgettable question that starts its introduction: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?”

Excerpts:

“[On Vertigo] The film ends with the magnigicent image of Scottie looking down from a great height to where Judy has fallen: magnificent, because it so perfectly crystallizes our complexity of response. Scottie is cured; yet his cure has destroyed at a blow both the reality and the illusion of Judy/Madeleine, has made the illusion of Madeleine’s death real. He is cured, but empty, desolate. Triumph and tragedy are indistinguishably fused.”

“[On Psycho] Much of the film’s significance is summed up in a single visual metaphor, making use again of eyes, occurring at the film’s focal point (the murder of Marion): the astonishing cut from the close-up of the water and blood spiralling down the drain, to the close-up of the eye of the dead girl, with the camera spiralling outward from it. It is as if we have emerged from the depths behind the eye, the round hole of the drain leading down into an apparently bottomless darkness, the potentialities for horror that lie in the depths of us all, and which have their source in sex, which the remainder of the film is devoted to sounding.”

“[On Marnie] Now, Hitchcock is not Preminger: he doesn’t want merely to show us a woman caught in this condition, he wants to convey to us the feeling of the condition itself – wants us to experience it directly as Marnie experiences it, as far as that is possible. What better, simpler, more beautifully economical and direct way than by these red flashes that suffuse the whole screen, filling us, too, with a feeling of panic (we know no more than Marnie what they mean), conveying this sense of being plunged abruptly, arbitrarily, into unreality?

“It is symptomatic that the most obvious legacy of Hitchcock’s Jesuit education should be the lingering fascination with Hell and damnation, often concretized in the detail of the films. When Uncle Charlie arrives in Santa Rosa (Shadow of a Doubt), the whole image is darkened by the black smoke from the train, and the character is thereafter repeatedly shown with smoke hanging around him from his cigarette; when Bruno pursues Miriam through the Tunnel of Lover (Strangers on a Train) his boat is named Pluto; when Marion Crane tells Norman Bates that she “thought she must have gotten off the right road,” he replies that “Nobody ever comes here unless they’ve done that.” It is to these “damned” characters (ambiguously lost souls or devils) that Hitchcock’s strongest interest gravitates, giving us some of the most vividly realized performances in his films; one looks in vain for any compensating intimation of Heaven.”

Link to the complete book on PDF:
https://mega.nz/#!Yb4zAS7L!8iT779ptnykCqgCVRi9RckaeMVAHilZsyhFb7ia0ZfA