The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Cohen)

The films of Alfred Hitchcock have been at the very heart of film criticism and at the very centre of of the development of academic film studies in the West in the wake of World War II. While I don't have the numbers here, it is clear, just by a quick perusal of writings on Hitchcock, that no one, apart, perhaps, from Orson Welles, has generated the amount of film criticism and film studies Alfred Hitchcock and his films have.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly the American films he made after coming to the US in 1939 to work for producer David O. Selznick, have been subjected to a variety of approaches to film: "humanist", auteurist, semiological, marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, queer, and some hybrid of all the above. Roberta Morantz Cohen's Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) takes a historical, sociological, and cultural approach to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films correspond to Hitchcock's movement from modern Victorianism to postmodern postmodernism.  Hitchcock films to 1939, Cohen argues, reflect a Victorian reaction to the complex novels with complex characters, particularly female characters, of an earlier era, something she traces to,  Hitchcock's marriage to his wife Alma, the family they created, and Victorian family ideology. His films from 1939 to the early 1960s reflect an attempt by Hitchcock and others to recapture the complex novels of an earlier era and adapt them to film. Cohen calls this the daughter effect and traces it to Hitchcock's case relationship with his daughter Patricia. His films from the late 1970s to his last film in 1975, reflect postmodern cultural currents that sought to eliminate characterisation and critique dominant cultural and social norms.

While Cohen's attempt to historicise psychoanalysis and feminist theory is to be admired several issues beyond the questionable universality of psychoanalytic concepts and the sometimes confusion of psychoanalysis as a way of understanding the world and as a cultural phenomenon that impacted the arts and beyond, must be raised. Isn't it better to utilise the more viable approach of sociology and sociological socialisation than that of problematic psychoanalysis? Isn't it important to explore economic and institutional contexts of action along with cultural ones? Should homiletics, the quality of a film, be judged on the basis of ideology of the analyst? While Hitchcock certainly tried to manipulate his audience in certain directions via suspense, for example, did all those who watched Hitchcock films react to them in the same way or the same general ways? Isn't it important for scholars of film to undertake quantitative and qualitative studies of film response and explore, in the process, the broader contexts of film hermeneutics? Are academic readings of films and film directors impacted by their historical economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts?