Psycho and the crystal image

LWU: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 2014

Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining 1960 classic Psycho, three Psycho sequels (1983, 1986, and 1990), the television pilot Bates Motel (1987), Gus Van Sant’s much-maligned Psycho remake (1998), and the new television series Bates Motel (2013-) attest to an ongoing fascination with the story about the murderer Norman Bates and raise pertinent questions as to the narrative possibilities of innovative reproduction. The individual entries to the franchise function as serial installments in an ongoing narrative and draw attention to the impact remaking has on dynamic processes of meaning-making over time. This essay focuses on the most recent addition to the Psycho franchise: A&E's Bates Motel. It examines the new television series’ self-description as a contemporary prequel, and discusses aspects of the series that will shed light on both the cultural functions and narrative possibilities of Bates Motel within the Psycho franchise and the practice of remaking as such.

Marginalia hors série no 21: bibliographie internationale des études sur la vie et l'oeuvre d'Alfred Hitchcock. This document is an international basic bibliography of secondary sources on the life and work of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock

2014

This essay analyses some of the most significant manifestations of cinematic intertextuality generated by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): remakes, sequels, revisionist films and other aesthetic proposals; based on Bloom’s concepts of anxiety of influence and misreading as part of its theoretical framework. The objective is to elucidate whether the chain of influences created by the original hypotext has paved the way for its inclusion in the canon, as well as whether the pressure imposed by the brilliance of the original film –such as its contribution to the slasher movie subgenre– has resulted in a perennial debt of dimensions that have not as yet been overcome.

Dal romanzo di Bloch a Rihanna Crane: l'ecosistema narrativo di Psycho oltre il film capolavoro di Hitchcock.

A Companion to Hitchcock Studies (Blackwell), 2011

Wide Screen, 1.2, 2010

This essay revisits some of the most significant and enduring debates over the status of cinema as a popular form. The first debate is over the 'aura' and film. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin celebrated the democratic moment when technical reproducibilityculminating with film-abolished the centuries-old 'aura' of art. Conversely, in "The Culture Industry" (1944), Theodor Adorno lamented the anti-enlightenment standardization wrought by the assembly line under monopoly capitalism, and the movies were for him a primary example of this mindlessness. Arguably, auteurism emerged in the crossfire of the legacies of Benjamin and Adorno. Since it sought to cordon films off from the undistinguished mass of studio 'product' by elevating certain film-makers into the rarefied air of individual expression, 'auteur theory' may be said to have conferred a plenitude on its chosen few, a plenitude akin to aura. The second debate that I revisit is therefore that between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, a debate surrounding the Americanization of the auteur.

Open Screens Journal, 2018

As a filmmaker who frequently enjoyed unusual artistic control over his output, Alfred Hitchcock was known for appearing not only in his films but also in their trailers. But while the studios understood that Hitchcock’s appeal was a key part of his films’ selling points, his role in such content was, for the most part, a corollary to the task of having to sell a motion picture. As the director’s influence began to grow and his own sense of authorship began concomitantly to develop, in these trailers (filmic paratexts), Hitchcock, as the author argues, increasingly makes the case for his artistic intentions, mirroring the ambiguous and excessive style of his contemporaneous filmmaking in such promotional material. In so doing, Hitchcock promotes ostensibly ‘closed texts’ not open to interpretation while offering the potential for polysemantic renderings of such texts – opening the paratext. In this way, the trailer serves as both promotional product and critical (self-)appraisal, suggesting in the textual and paratextual construction of the Hitchcock trailer an intersection of the materialism of the commercial package and the abstraction of artistic ambition.