The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock

[some light staining. light soiling and age-toning to the front cover, faint dampstain at upper corner of rear cover slightly affecting the last few pages]. (B&W photographs) Published in conjunction with the first major American retrospective of Hitchcock's films, this rather scarce 48-page monograph was the earliest critical work on the Master of Suspense to be published in the U.S. It's hard to imagine today that the director was not always regarded as a serious film artist -- yet in 1963, just prior to the release of THE BIRDS (and thus with PSYCHO, which despite its enduring reputation was distasteful to many contemporary critics, freshest in the public mind -- not to mention his weekly TV appearances), Hitchcock was still largely dismissed as just an "entertainer." This book and the MoMA retrospective (both of which had the full cooperation of Hitchcock and his publicists) marked the beginning of the elevation of his critical stature, especially in the U.S. The monograph examines Hitchcock' s career in more or less chronological fashion, with filmographic information and brief commentary by Bogdanovich interspersed with excerpts from his interview with the director. (In fact, it more or less reads like a prototype for the famous Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book -- the tape-recorded sessions that formed the basis for that work having commenced several months prior to the MoMA retrospective, essentially as part of the same self-promotional agenda.) At any rate, the Truffaut book was delayed by several years, and this modest little monograph thus stands as the first significant "modern-era" Hitchcock publication, and therefore arguably one of the most important works of film criticism ever published. This was the last of the three director-devoted monographs authored for MoMA by Bogdanovich (preceded by those on Orson Welles and Howard Hawks), whose own directorial career was then just over the horizon.

Product Info

Publisher: Museum of Modern Art

Year: 1963

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

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