#Best alfred hitchcock movies popmatters series
#Best alfred hitchcock movies popmatters windows

#Best alfred hitchcock movies popmatters series

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.Breathless turned 50 just once this year, but Psycho's celebrating its anniversary twice - first with a re-release in the UK back in April and again right now with an eleven-part 'Director's Spotlight' series on Alfred Hitchcock at PopMatters. How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks “As viewers,” writes Blythe, “we become complicit in the same morbid human fantasies,” as Stewart’s creepy Jeff, “rubber-necking the same lurid acts from the safe vantage point of our chairs.” As the cinematic image of the voyeur has shown us, however - in Hitchcock, Haneke, Lynch, and its many iterations of what Laura Mulvey called the “male gaze” - the act of watching from a distance can become a kind of violence all its own in Hitchcockian cinema, the menace that often seems to lurk just out of frame in Hopper’s paintings can burst into the picture at any moment.Īlfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating SuspenseĮdward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7-Minute Video Introduction Hitchcock takes Hopper’s gaze, so often framed by windows, and makes it about cinema itself. Just as the power of Hopper’s paintings lies in what he chooses to exclude, so the tension and spectacle in Hitchcock’s Rear Window relies on what is obscured or unseen.” Hopper’s figures are not only lonely and alienated, they are vulnerable, and especially so in private, unguarded moments in their own homes. Evidence of Hopper’s influence can be found throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but especially his 1954 classic Rear Window. “For Hitchcock in particular,” writes Finn Blythe at Hero, “Hopper’s gaze was like a petri dish from which an infinite number of possible narratives could grow.

#Best alfred hitchcock movies popmatters windows

In a series of juxtapositions on Twitter, Doniol-Valcroze shows how Hitchcock adopted the framing of paintings like Hopper’s Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), Hotel Room (1931), Room in New York (1932) for shots of Rear Window’s “Miss Torso” and “Miss Lonelyhearts.” She is not the only critic to make the comparison. One answer, says writer Diane Doniol-Valcroze - daughter of Cahiers Du Cinéma co-founder Jacques Doniol-Valcroze - is found in a comparison of Hitchcock’s visual sense with that of Edward Hopper, the inventer of midcentury modern loneliness and also himself kind of a classic Peeping Tom. The road from Hitchcock to the psychosexual alienation of later arthouse cinema may be a short one, but where did Hitchcock’s framing of the voyeuristic gaze come from? These are classic iterations of the Peeping Tom, the casual voyeur sexually awakened by covert observations of others.