Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies v2

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In the first "The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock films a clay pigeon crossing the sky, a dark disc resembling a black sun. When the same work takes viewers into a temple for sun worshippers (it turns out to be a front for spies), another black orb is introduced: a black marble used to hypnotize initiates. Tom Cohen traces this motif--and many other--seeing it as an explicit challenge both to Enlightenment-era protocols of representation and to the auteurism that has defined studies of Hitchcock. This second volume presents the director's works as a radical collage of images and absences, letters and numbers, citations and sound that together mark Hitchcock as a knowing figure who was entirely aware of his--and cinema's--place at the dawn of a global media culture, as well as of the cinema's revolutionary impact on perception and memory. Cohen's provocative interrogation culminates in an innovative close analysis of "To Catch a Thief, a work disregarded by the critical establishment as being merely light entertainment. Cohen sees Hitchcock's films as "war machines"--hiding in plain sight at the center of the film canon--designed as much to erode traditional models of home, family, and state as to sabotage increasingly obsolete ways of seeing and knowing.