1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798455203321

Autore

Durgnat Raymond

Titolo

A long hard look at 'Psycho' / / Raymond Durgnat

Pubbl/distr/stampa

London : , : British Film Institute, , 2010

ISBN

1-83871-420-0

1-83871-180-5

1-84457-560-8

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (313 pages) : illustrations, photographs

Collana

BFI silver

Disciplina

791.4372

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Compliant with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Content is displayed as HTML full text which can easily be resized or read with assistive technology, with mark-up that allows screen readers and keyboard-only users to navigate easily.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction to the 2010 Edition by Henry K. Miller.- Introduction to the 2002 Edition.- Developing the Film.- A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho'.- Matters Arising.- Notes.- Credits.- Bibliography.

Sommario/riassunto

"Upon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative, enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing and shot composition. In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths



about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early 1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho became one of its first objects."--Bloomsbury Publishing.