The Paradigm Case : The Cinema of Hitchcock and the Contemporary Visual Arts Paperback / softback

by Bernard McCarron

Part of the Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts series

Paperback / softback

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Description

With the migration of cinema into the art gallery, artists have been turning, with remarkable regularity and ingenuity, to Alfred Hitchcock-related images, sequences and iconography.

The world of Hitchcockâ€™s cinema â€“ a classical cinema of formal unities and narrative coherence â€“ represents more than the spectre of a supposedly dead art form: it transcends its own filmic and institutional contexts, becoming an important audio-visual lexicon of desire, loss, mystery and suspense. Through a detailed study of the Hitchcock-related work of artist-filmmakers Matthias MÃ¼ller and Christoph Girardet, Johan Grimonprez, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Atom Egoyan, this book facilitates a dialogue between the creative appropriation of Hitchcockâ€™s films and the cinematic practices that increasingly inform the wider field of the contemporary visual arts.

Each chapter is structured around a consideration of how the artwork in question has reconfigured or â€˜remadeâ€™ key Hitchcockian expressive elements and motifs â€“ in particular, the relationship between mise en scÃ¨ne and the mechanics of suspense, time, memory, history and death.

In a career that extended across silent and sound eras as well as the British, European and Hollywood industries, Hitchcockâ€™s film Å“uvre can be seen as a history of the cinema itself.

As the work of these contemporary artist-filmmakers shows, it was also a history of the future, a paradigm case par excellence.