Misdirection in Fits and Starts: Alfred Hitchcock's Popular Reputation and the Reception of His Films

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Notes

1. See Seth Friedman, “Cloaked Classification: The Misdirection Film and Generic Duplicity,” The Journal of Film and Video. 58.4 (Winter 2006): 16–28.

2. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argues that Hitchcock's protagonists are an onscreen manifestation of the one of the few viewing positions that the always-male gendered spectator of Hollywood films is able to accept. Specifically, she theorizes that spectators experience the events of the narrative through the eyes of the active Hitchcockian male hero who gazes voyeuristically at the passive female object of desire. Similarly, in “System of a Fragment,” Bellour's meticulously close analysis of the Bodega Bay sequence from The Birds (1963), he contends that the formal oppositions that comprise the scene, such as editing and camera movements, contain the kind of alternating symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns that typify Hollywood's conventional mode of representation.