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Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies Volume I: Secret Agents Tom Cohen Also of interest: |
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$75.00 Cloth |
A radical rereading of Hitchcock decodes the director's dense network of signatures and markings. Tom Cohen’s radical exploration of Hitchcock’s cinema departs from conventional approaches—psychoanalytic, feminist, political—to emphasize the dense web of signatures and markings inscribed on and around his films. Aligning Hitchcock’s agenda with the philosophical and aesthetic writings of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Benjamin, Cohen's project dramatically recasts the history and meaning of cinema itself. This first volume of Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies provides a singularly close reading of films such as The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, and North by Northwest, exposing the often imperceptible visual and aural puns, graphic elements, and cryptograms that traverse his entire body of work. Within Hitchcock’s cinema, Cohen argues, these "secret agents" have more than just decorative or symbolic significance; they also reflect, critique, and disrupt traditional cinematic practice, undermining ways of seeing inherited from the Enlightenment and prefiguring postmodern culture. From the recurrence of the eye motif and the frequency of names beginning with "Mar" to the role of memory and the director’s trademark cameos, Cohen offers an unprecedented guide to the entirety of Hitchcock’s labyrinthine signature system. At the same time, he liberates Hitchcock’s works from film history (modernist, auteurist), revealing them as unsettled events in the archaeology of contemporary global image culture. “These two books are a virtuoso performance of reading and interpreting the Hitchcockian corpus.” —ArtUS “Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies is an intellectual event of the first order for film studies, critical theory, and philosophy. In the originality of its challenge to received critical approaches, it has no peer in film theory. Cohen forces the reader to reassess not simply the ostensible object of his study but the nature of reality, the history of the West, and all ways of knowing. Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies is a work that should be counted with the breakthrough books of the twentieth century; if enough readers take the time to let the book speak, it should remake film studies and philosophy, too.” —Film Criticism Tom Cohen is professor of American literary, critical, and cinematic studies at the University at Albany. He is the author of Anti-Mimesis: From Plato to Hitchcock and Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” after Benjamin, and coeditor of Material Events (2000). 376 pages | 42 halftones | 5 7/8 x 9 | May 2005 |
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