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Hitchcock's Romantic Irony (Film and Culture) | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Allen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 276014
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0231135750
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.430233092
EAN: 9780231135757
ASIN: 0231135750
Publication Date: September 14, 2007
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive world view - the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed.Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.
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A great read for Hitchcock fans November 12, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
With the sheer amount of Hitchcock scholarship out there, one would hardly think there was anything more left to say. Allen's impressive and comprehensive book proves otherwise. Allen draws on all of this previous scholarship (he is an editor of Hitchcock Annual and two anthologies on the director) by arguing that all of the conflicting interpretations of HItchcock's singular films is symptomatic of the director's specifically cultivated aesthetic of romantic irony. Romantic irony, a term borrowed from literature, is when the writer or filmmaker presents competing and opposed perspectives, yet refuses to privilege one over the other, allowing both conflicting interpretations to remain true. It turns out that romantic irony provides a rather useful lens with which to focus the vast output of Hitchcock's films (53 features total, most of which Allen discusses in detail). The book's first section mounts a defense of the use of romantic irony, as well as a classification of the narrative forms found through Hitchcock's body of films, including an extended discussion of the director's well-known use of suspense. The book's best chapters, though, come in its second half where Allen devotes his attention to a detailed consideration of the filmmaker's visual style, including the influence of German expressionism and the director's elaborate use of color. Film studies in general rarely attends to the formal and stylistic features of a director's work in this kind of detail, and while Allen's own admiration for Hitchcock is on evidence, he lets the filmmaker's greatness speaks for itself.
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