Tampilkan postingan dengan label Alfred Hitchcock. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Alfred Hitchcock. Tampilkan semua postingan

Home » Posts filed under Alfred Hitchcock

Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 23 Desember 2013

 

A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

 
More about → Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine
di 04.48 { Add komentar }
Label: , , , , , , , , , , ,

LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 16 September 2013

Screen shot from Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993). Read Adrian Martin's essay on this film in the new issue of LOLA .
Film Studies For Free is thrilled to hear that a new rolling issue of LOLA has launched. Issue 4 treats the very cinematic topic of 'Walks' and contains some items (Victor Bruno on lighting effects in Out of the Past, a fine translation of an Alain Bergala essay on Vertigo and Obsession, and several further excellent pieces on De Palma) that will very much repay a speedy stroll over there to check them out.

Over the coming weeks, LOLA will go on to present further articles on Kira Muratova, Frank Tashlin, the Cinema of Compassion, CinemaScope, The Grandmaster, and much more! Those enticing contents will slowly be added to the already delightful ones linked to below.
More about → LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more
di 04.18 { Add komentar }
Label: , , , , , , , , , ,

New MOVIE! VERTIGO, Hal Ashby, Luis Buñuel, Charles Chaplin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, George Toles, Charles Barr, Andrew Klevan, Hoagy Carmichael

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 02 April 2013

Frame grab of Robert Mitchum in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959). Read Pete Falconer's study of this film in the great new issue of MOVIE

Woohoo! The wonderful issue 4 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has hit the e-stands!

Edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, this one is sure to be a classic. Highlights, for FSFF, include Andrew Sarris (on Buñuel's Viridiana [1960]) and Robin Wood tribute archives, as well as the new 'Opening Shots' feature with great contributions by Charles Barr and Pete Falconer. But there are some truly remarkable feature articles in this issue, too, including Adam O'Brien on Hal Ashby's film The Last Detail and George Toles on cinematic images of luxury.

Thanks for the film critical luxury and largesse, MOVIE people!

MOVIE, Issue 4, 2013
  • Andrew Sarris: A Tribute
  • A Robin Wood Archive (2)
This issue was designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.
More about → New MOVIE! VERTIGO, Hal Ashby, Luis Buñuel, Charles Chaplin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, George Toles, Charles Barr, Andrew Klevan, Hoagy Carmichael
di 06.07 { Add komentar }
Label: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 29 November 2012

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isn't free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:
Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:
Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathley's work:
More about → To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online
di 02.03 { Add komentar }
Label: , , , , , , , , ,

Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 19 November 2012



Tag Gallagher: A New Reality. Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, guillare di Dio, (US 2006)

[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio.  ['Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009]
The first video I made about Roberto Rossellini was [on Francesco, giullare di Dio]. I made it for a company that turned it down because it did not like the quality of the recording of my voice. So I lost the opportunity to publish this essay in that country, and in some others. [...] So I showed my video on Francesco only at some museums and gave some copies to friends, but that was it.  [Excerpts from a January 2012 interview with Gallagher: Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]]

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish online, for the first time, film critic and historian extraordinaire Tag Gallagher's first video essay on a Roberto Rossellini film.

To celebrate and accompany this publication, for which FSFF and its readers have to thank the great Tag himself, below is a list of links to Gallagher's online film studies essays (written and audiovisual), interviews with him about his work, and studies of his work. If there is anything missing from the below lists, please leave a relevant link in the comments section. Many thanks!

    Gallagher's Written Work Online:

    Gallagher's Video Essays Online:

    Online Interviews with Gallagher:


    Online Studies or Reviews of Gallagher's Work:
    More about → Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher
    di 03.14 { Add komentar }
    Label: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Audiovisual Alfred Hitchcock Studies - For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon 2012

    Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 14 Mei 2012


    'Does Your Dog Bite?' 
    A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).


    Skipping Rope (Through Hitchcock's Joins) 
    A videographic assemblage by Catherine Grant of all the edits in Rope (Hitchcock, 1948), together with adjacent dialogue.
    You can read more about Rope and about the context of this video here.

    Film Studies For Free proudly presents, above and below, its annual contribution in support of the wonderful "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon", May 13-18, 2012. Two video essays (above) -- one newly published online for this occasion by Christian Keathley, the other newly made for it by FSFF's author -- plus (below) links to/embeds of lots more, fascinating and openly accessible, audiovisual studies of Hitchcock's films.

    This year, this Blogathon will raise funds to finance the online streaming of, and recording of a new score for, The White Shadow (1923), directed by Graham Cutts and with everything else done by Hitchcock:
    The film was long thought to have be a lost film. In August 2011, the National Film Preservation Foundation announced that the first three reels of the six-reel picture had been found in the garden shed of Jack Murtagh in Hastings, New Zealand in 1989 and donated to the NFPF. The film cans were mislabled Two Sisters and Unidentified American Film and only later identified. The film was restored by Park Road Studios and is now in the New Zealand Film Archive [The White Shadow Wikipedia entry] 
    Please consider supporting this cause by making a donation-- however small or large -- at this link. Thank you! 

    And a huge thanks, also, to Farran Nehme (read her great post on Farley Grainger who features in both of the new video essays), Marilyn Ferdinand and Rod Heath for devoting their marvellous websites and energies to assembling a team of well over one hundred bloggers from around the world to respond to this cause -- the third, great, year in a row.

    If you know of any further Alfred Hitchcock video essays of interest online, which aren't listed above or below, please leave a link in the comments.

    1. Vertigo Variations, Pt 1 A few ways of seeing Alfred Hitchcock's impossible object by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
    2. Vertigo Variations, Pt 2 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
    3. Vertigo Variations, Pt 3 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo


    (except for: Easy Virtue (1927); Blackmail (1929); Foreign Correspondent (1940); Suspicion (1941); Spellbound (1945); The Paradine Case (1947); Under Capricorn (1949))
     
    More about → Audiovisual Alfred Hitchcock Studies - For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon 2012
    di 02.09 { Add komentar }
    Label: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    New Issue of SENSES OF CINEMA

    Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 20 Maret 2012


     Film Studies For Free brings you the ever happy tidings of the new issue of Senses of Cinema.

    It's a fascinating collection of work, and very wide-ranging: from part one of an interview with, and an article by, Jean-Louis Comolli, film theorist and Cahiers du cinéma editor in possibly its most political period (1966-1978) through Murray Pomerance on Hitchcock to a number of articles on the Oscar-laden French film The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011).

    Links to all the great contents are given below.



    Senses of Cinema, Issue 62 Contents

    Editorial

    Feature Articles
    Great Directors
    Festival Reports
    Book Reviews
    Cteq Annotations
    More about → New Issue of SENSES OF CINEMA
    di 01.49 { Add komentar }
    Label: , , , , , , ,

    Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison

    Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 12 Maret 2012

    Garden of Forking Paths?
    A real-time space for comparison of a sequence in the sound and silent versions of Hitchcock's BLACKMAIL
    (Video edited by Catherine Grant)
     
    Having begun production as a silent film, the studio, British International Pictures, decided to convert [Blackmail (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)] to sound during shooting. A silent version was released [probably only in Britain] for theaters not equipped for sound (at 6740 feet), with the sound version (7136 feet) released at the same time.[*] The silent version still exists in the British Film Institute collection.[**] [Blackmail Wikipedia entry, last accessed March 12, 2012]
    Critic and historian Charles Barr, in his 1976 article "Blackmail: Silent and Sound", in which he closely compares the two versions, notes that the silent version shows Hitchcock striving to escape a 'theatrical' style in which the action is generally viewed face on, with the camera occupying the position of the 'fourth wall'. In a theatre, this represents the position of the proscenium arch, which marks the boundary between a conventional stage and the audience.
         In the silent version, Hitchcock experimented with changing the position of the camera within a scene, and tried to avoid 'face-on' set-ups, that is, where the camera is placed at ninety degrees to the action. Because of the limitations of sound at this early stage - for example the need to position the microphone where it can pick up all of the actors in the scene but cannot be seen - Hitchcock was obliged to adopt a less experimental approach in the framing of the sound version. [Mark Duguid, 'Hitchcock's Style', BFI Screenonline]
    Although 1929 was rather late for a "first" sound film, the delay enabled Hitchcock to produce an advanced meditation on the possible uses of sound. The text incorporates silent footage (lifted whole from the original silent version, made immediately prior to the sound version), which allows for a series of comparisons/contrasts between sound and silents/silence. The conceit of this early sound film is an attempt to keep a man silent (paying off a blackmailer). The heroine spends over a third of the film virtually speechless. When she finally speaks, her boyfriend urges her to keep quiet. The dialogue is laughably banal, yet the right word can cut like a knife. The opening scene, an exciting silent chase, is immediately contrasted with a poorly dubbed, confusingly cut dialogue scene that seems as if it will never end. But before we glibly assume silents were "better" movies, sound becomes a moral force, while silence is linked with corruption and moral lassitude.
         The text's position on "sound plus image" versus "image alone" is carefully paralleled with the depiction of Alice. Thematically, she veers from one extreme to the other. She is introduced as a chatterbox. After a violent assault, she becomes almost catatonic. Finally, she accepts speech as a moral imperative, achieving maturity and the audience's respect before slipping back under patriarchal control and enforced silence. Alice White becomes Hitchcock's personification of the course the sound film must take. [Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 119]
    Hitchcock first makes us aware that he is distorting the sound track subjectively when he exaggerates the loudness of bird chirpings to stress Alice's agitation on the morning after the murder. When the mother enters Alice's bedroom to wake her, she uncovers the cage of Alice's canary. Once the mother leaves the room, the bird's chirping is loudly insistent while the girl takes off the clothes she wore the night before and puts on fresh ones. The chirps are loudest, unnaturally so, when she is looking at herself in the mirror, the most "interior" action she performs while dressing. The sound reminds us of the tiny, birdlike jerkings that the girl made immediately after stabbing the artist. Just after the knife sequence there is another subjective distortion of sound, when a customer rings a bell as he enters the store. We are in the breakfast parlor, and yet the bell resonates much more loudly than it does elsewhere in the film. The camera is on a close-up of Alice's face to indicate that it is her point of view, once again, from which we hear.
         In a sense the use of bird noises in the bedroom scene should be distinguished from the other techniques mentioned here. Whereas aural restriction and distortion of loudness are related to character point of view, the choice specifically of bird sounds has a particular meaning for Hitchcock independent of the film. This sequence marks the beginning of an ongoing association of murder and bird noises in Hitchcock's mind that accrues meaning from film to film, from Blackmail and Murder through Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and Psycho, and culminates in The Birds. [Elizabeth Weiss, 'Chapter 2: First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder' in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982) p. 46]

    One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us.

    Embedded above is FSFF's homemade example of this kind of simple, more or less medium-specific, eloquence: a real-time video juxtaposition, made for the purposes of scholarly comparison, of corresponding sequences from the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929). It is a work intended to supplement the contribution of an earlier blog entry here, entitled Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema in which the two sequences were separately embedded.

    But it is also intended to publicise FSFF's support, as ever, for the very relevant For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon which will take place this year between May 13-18, 2012 . The blogathon has a Hitchcock theme and will support an important film preservation and dissemination project focusing on an early 'Hitchcock film': The White Shadow (1923).

    You can read more about the blogathon below, and much more about it at the linked-to websites. But suffice to say this may not be the last Hitchcockian video study here at Film Studies For Free this Spring!
    It's time to reveal our fundraising project for 2012: Online streaming and recording of the new score for THE WHITE SHADOW, directed by Graham Cutts and everything else done by Alfred Hitchcock. It's all about access this year, folks. [For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon Facebook page, February 1, 2012]
    The good people at National Film Preservation Foundation are committed to making many of the films they have rescued available for cost-free viewing by streaming them on their website. But online hosting ain’t cheap. NFPF estimates that it will cost $15,000 to stream The White Shadow for four months and record the score. It is the mission of this year’s For the Love of Film Blogathon to raise that money so that anyone with access to a computer can watch this amazing early film that offered Hitchcock a chance to learn his craft, with a score that does it justice. [Marilyn Ferdinand introducing the cause supported by this year's For the Love of Film [Hitchcock] Blogathon at her website Ferdy on Films]
      v
      More about → Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison
      di 10.03 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , ,

      Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

      Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 17 Januari 2012

      Last updated January 20, 2012

      A psychosexually obsessed man wanders the streets of 1950s San Francisco; he spies [on] seemingly unavailable blonde women; he makes a woman fall from a height; she drops into water; the scene is filled with circle imagery, especially circles within circles.....  [See the original sequence]
      As Film Studies For Free's readers may have heard, Kim Novak, co-star of Vertigo, took out an ad in trade magazine Variety to protest about the recent use of an excerpt from Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film in Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 modern silent film The Artist. "I want to report a rape," went the headline. "I feel as if my body - or at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist," Novak wrote. She went on to criticise the “use and abuse [of] famous pieces of work to gain attention and applause for other than what they were intended.”

      There was quite a strong international reaction to Novak's intervention. Some were dismayed by her recourse to the lexicon of rape; others were more sympathetic to her stance and background as someone very much not from the digital age of remix and creative appropriation; still others remind us that, in 'Scene d'Amour', the musical Vertigo theme in question, Herrmann was, of course, inspirationally reworking some of Richard Wagner's motifs from his Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Good artists copy; great artists steal?

      Enter the story the PRESS PLAY blog which launched a contest inviting readers to re-use Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music in their own mash-up, inspired by the idea that "Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression."

      Film Studies For Free's author was only too happy to have a go, joining the legions of those who, like Hazanavicius, have used Herrmann's music in their work, in large or very small ways. Her choice of film sequence? One borrowed from The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk's 1952 film noir, with its own, obsessed, wandering male protagonist and San Francisco setting.

      The Sniper was one of the films that probably directly inspired Vertigo, as well as Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho -- see critic Dave Kehr's thoughts on this. The above mash-up chooses, then, to marry Herrmann's lush Wagnerian romance with the key 'amusement park' sequence from Dmytryk's brilliant film, with its astonishing performance of overt misogyny by Arthur Franz as Edward "Eddie" Miller -- perhaps the perfect, filmic, mirror-image of James Stewart's unforgettable, unconsciously misogynist, John "Scottie" Ferguson.

      FSFF's author was excited to experience at first-hand the scholarly possibilities of remixing film clips in this way (the contest rules state that the original film sequence cannot be re-edited in any way -- except, if you choose to, by removing its sound -- in order not to cheat with the creative re-juxtaposition process).

      Remixing is an astonishingly good (and amazingly easy) way of really -- almost literally -- getting inside a film sequence. It is thus a truly great exercise for all students of film with access to the right digital tools. Analysing just how the mash-up adapts the meaning of the original music and original sequence is rather educational and fun, too!

      If you get your skates on with the Vertigo score exercise, there are still three days left for Press Play's contest entries. Click here to watch the (over 60) entries at present.

      FSFF's favorite entry to the contest, so far, is a mash-up which, rather like its own, plays on the conscious or unconscious connections between an earlier film and Vertigo. It's Matthew Cheney's wonderful work with Mädchen in Uniform (the brilliant 1931 film by Leontine Sagan). But there are loads of other imaginative and highly satisfying remixes that you will enjoy checking out. UPDATE: the videographic legend that is Steven Boone just added a late Vertigoed entry which is FSFF's new favourite: a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

      If you want to see even more brilliant, Vertigo mash-up work -- actually, a work of remix in a completely different, utterly sublime class -- you simply must check out The Vertigo Variations by remarkable critic-filmmaker B. Kite.

      And, for more vertiginous sublimity, don't forget FSFF's very own Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo entry.



      The mash up video at the top of the post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, with non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in January 2012. 
      More about → Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?
      di 05.49 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , , , , , , ,

      Latest issues of KINEMA: von Trier, Czech cinema, Romanian cinema, Woody Allen, cult cinema, de Mille, Schnabel, Practice vs. Theory

      Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 10 Januari 2012

      More about → Latest issues of KINEMA: von Trier, Czech cinema, Romanian cinema, Woody Allen, cult cinema, de Mille, Schnabel, Practice vs. Theory
      di 06.52 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , , , , ,

      New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

      Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 02 Januari 2012

      Frame grab from Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958). See Christian Keathley's article on découpage in this film here

      Film Studies For Free was thrilled that a new issue of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism -- the best yet of this relaunched journal -- has recently hit the online newstands.

      Issue 3 contains part 2 of the marvellous Fritz Lang Dossier, with contributions by, among others, V. F. Perkins, Adrian Martin, Peter Evans, Stella Bruzzi, Ed Gallafent, and Deborah Thomas.

      There are also excellent articles on Preminger's film art, Psycho and its remake, and filmmakers' choices by Christian Keathley, Alex Clayton and John Gibbs.

      Links to all items are set out for you below.

      This issue edited by Douglas Pye and Michael Walker. Designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.
      More about → New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices
      di 08.59 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , , , , ,

      Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema

      Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 26 September 2011


      Hitchcock's use of sound in Blackmail and Murder is important in three respects. As historical documents the two films overturn some accepted notions of what was technically possible in filming with immobilized cameras and uneditable sound systems. As personal documents they represent Hitchcock's first major experiments in combining sound and image in ways that would not subordinate pictures to dialogue. As films that extend Hitchcock's expressionistic interests into the sound era, they reveal Hitchcock's earliest efforts to use aural techniques to convey a character's feelings. In addition, Blackmail already establishes Hitchcock's predilection for integrating music and sound effects with plot and theme, and it introduces most of his favorite aural motifs. Both films are interesting historically, but Blackmail is the more successful work of art because its aural techniques and motifs are an integral part of a stylistic whole. [Elisabeth Weis, Chapter 2: "First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder", in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcocks Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 28]
      A new academic year is upon us and Film Studies For Free's author is very happily gearing up to teach, inter alia, Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail for the umpteenth time.

      It's a truly great teaching topic, one which usually takes off from the fact that Hitchcock converted his silent film to sound during its production. And it has very fruitfully inspired today's entry on scholarship about sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

      There are some excellent, openly accessible resources linked to below, most notably Elisabeth Weis's wonderful book on this topic, now added to FSFF's permanent listing of online and freely accessible Film Studies e-books.
      More about → Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema
      di 07.49 { Add komentar }
      Label: , , , , , ,