Alfred Hitchcock

On October 13-17, 1999, the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, of which I was then the chair, organized a large-scale conference, "Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration," to mark the centenary of Alfred Hitchcock's birth on August 13, 1899. The conference comprised both a large number of academic panels devoted to various aspects of Hitchcock's work and plenary sessions featuring a number of Hitchcock's film collaborators: the screen-writers Jay Presson Allen, Evan Hunter, Arthur Laurents, and Joe Stefano; and the actors Patricia Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, and Teresa Wright. Hitchcock: Past and Future presents a selection of the academic papers presented at the conference. Some have been extensively revised and expanded, while others are printed here more or less as they were given at the time. The Hitchcock centenary seemed an opportune moment to reassert the significance and value of cinema as a form of artistic expression through a consideration of one of the medium's most widely celebrated and influential practitioners.

Alfred Hitchcock is an exemplary figure in this context because he embodies what has always been at stake in defending film as an art form once it is conceded that film, given its thorough dependence on technical equipment, can actually be an art form. This is the relationship that the medium bears to a mass audience on account of its dependence upon technology and technical development to which stylistic innovation is, as Alfred Hitchcock recognized, partially wedded. Filmmaking at the highest technical standard requires on-going capital investment in order to be sustained on a consistent basis, and hence it presupposes a large and regular stream of revenue that only a mass audience can provide. Hitchcock's films demonstrate, perhaps better than the works of any other director, the achievements that are possible in film as a medium for reflecting upon the conditions of human existence in a context where the production of art is explicitly concerned with maintaining commercial appeal. The auteurist critics of Cahiers du cinema were the first to recognize Hitchcock's exemplary status in this regard. Furthermore, while successive generations of ideological critics have sought to point out the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock's films inhabit narrative conventions that reproduce certain cultural stereotypes, they have nonetheless singled Hitchcock out for the self-conscious way in which he inhabits these conventions and calls into question the patterns of human behavior and interaction they reproduce.

This is not the place to diagnose the pervasive skepticism about textual meaning, about the objectivity of value judgments, indeed about the possibility of human agreement itself that underlies the denigration of the study of cinema as an art form in the university just as it threatens humanistic understanding in general, suffice it to say that "Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration" was conceived as an antidote to such a skepticism and the devaluation of the art of film it engenders. I cannot claim, of course, that all the participants at the conference - the contributors to this volume in particular - share my diagnosis of the state of film studies or my conception of the role of Hitchcock and Hitchcock Studies as a possible antidote to it. There was, nevertheless, a spirit of celebration at the conference regarding Hitchcock's achievements in film, or what was achieved under Alfred Hitchcock's name, and it is reflected in the tone of many of the scholarly essays in this collection. For while they are undoubtedly methodologically diverse in a manner that reflects the range of papers that were presented at the conference, they are characterized by a concern to explicate, and, yes, to celebrate, the expressive and representational possibilities and parameters of Alfred Hitchcock's work, even as some of them seek to qualify an authorially-based understanding of it.