She serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media and as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), is a murder thriller centered on the dysfunctional relationship between a young woman and her uncle. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books ranging from Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001) to The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016). Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. Intended to clear space for Shadow of a Doubt in a celebrated pantheon of classic cinema, this book also works to open up the film to students. Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centered Hitchcock text and a milestone film not only because it marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life. In a related way it illustrates how the film’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship and social history, knowledge and epistemology, homesickness and “family values,” it shows how the film’s impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. This scrupulously organized film operates as a “master class” on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. The film exhibits a meticulous consistency as a cause and effect chain and in the way that its various scenes and sequences come together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters. Given Hitchcock’s predilection for obsessive details, it seems likely that one of the reasons he liked Shadow so much is that is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system. Shadow of a Doubt Diane Negra, Forthcoming, Auteur Books, 2021 Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s fifth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favorite and his best.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |