A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho'

by Durgnat, Raymond; Miller, Henry

• ISBN13: 9781844573585
• ISBN10: 1844573583
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-07
• Publisher: British Film Institute

Summary

In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presentsA Long Hard Look at Psychoas the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error', tracing the path of a project that began at the time of the film's release, and which drew on Durgnat's sense of kinship with its director, a fellow north-east Londoner. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular - concepts like illusionism, character identification, scopophilia, and classical narrative - Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This offbeat band of collaborators and '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 on the day in March 1962 when Dickinson took his cinephile seminar through Hitchcock's film shot-by-shot on an editing machine - the first long hard look of many.

Author Biography

RAYMOND DURGNAT (1932-2002) was the author of many groundbreaking books about the cinema, among them Films and Feelings (1967), A Mirror for England (1970), Sexual Alienation in the Cinema (1971), The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir (both 1974) and a study of WR: Mysteries of the Organism in the BFI Film Classics series (1999).  Educated at the University of Cambridge and the Slade School of Art, he went on to hold teaching positions at St Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art and the University of East London, as well as visiting professorships at Columbia University, the University of California and Dartmouth College.
 
Introduction by HENRY K. MILLER  - Film Critic and Writer who has contributed to publications including Time Out, Sight& Sound, Vertigo and Film Comment.  

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 2010 edition by Henry Miller * Introduction to the 2002 edition * Developing the Film * A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' * Matters Arising * Notes * Credits * Bibliography