Hitchcock's Romantic Irony

Film and Culture Series

by Richard Allen

Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed. Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.

Genres: Film

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Richard William Allen is the Dean of School o­­f Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong and Chair/Professor of Film and Media Art. Previously he was a Professor of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is author and editor of 9 books on film theory and aesthetics. He is author of Projecting Illusion and the editor of two volumes on the philosophy of film and the arts: Film Theory and Philosophy, and Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. He is a leading authority on Hitchcock and wrote an influential book, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. He is currently completing Bollywood Poetics and beginning a longer-term project on The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination. He is a fellow of the Society for the Cognitive Study of Moving Image, and was for many years an editor of the Hitchcock Annual.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Allen, Richard, 1959-
from Library of Congress website

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written and interesting perspective on Hitchcock's work. While certainly scholarly, it's written in a straightforward and direct style that is thought-provoking and always interesting. It definitely made me think more closely about Hitchcock's work in a more analytical way, and I feel that I can appreciate his films more after having read this. I'm actually taking a class at NYU with the author, and the subject of the course is not only Hitchcock, but the way he has influenced other filmmakers -- upon reading this book, you will definitely start to see some of these traits in other films that came later, and really shows how pervasive Hitchcock's style was in film history. Definitely recommended.