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.
Hitchcockparatextstrailersfilm studiesMarnie
In early 1964, anticipating the US release of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, Universal Pictures had a film that, on
paper, promised success given its star performers and director. Yet the studio felt
nervous about how local audiences might receive their product.1 Given that the film features marital rape, cod-Freudian melodrama,
kleptomania, prostitution and several indulgent subplots, their twitchiness in
retrospect seems justified. It did not seem to help that Marnie came on
the back of a decade-long run that had taken in Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry
(1955), The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1956), The Wrong
Man (1956), Vertigo
(1958), North by Northwest
(1959), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). The studio was not merely dealing with a
tranche of critical or commercial successes (and frequently both); it had also to
contend with a marquee director who was, as Keith Johnston suggests, ‘big enough
to do what [he] wanted’. (2009, p. 167)
Marnie and its attendant publicity comes with Hitchcock at the peak of
his powers: he was already enjoying unfettered artistic freedom and personal expression
that had begun with his move to Paramount.2 Thus,
for the studio, its release marked the perfect storm of necessary banker and dangerously
unrestrained auteur – and here I focus on the trailer of that
film and others produced during Hitchcock’s ascendant position given their
symbolic role in this dynamic, and how they differ from trailers that precede and follow
it (during which Hitchcock’s influence was either on the rise or had begun to
wane).3
In addition, the indulgences of Hitchcock’s cinematic preoccupations – indeed
those hallmarks Cahiers du Cinéma would use to label him as an
auteur labouring under the Hollywood yoke – had increasingly
come to characterise his work within the US studio system.4 But these were not limited to his textual output: the director was already
substantially involved in the production of his own trailers as well. Bearing in mind
Hitchcock’s position of near-infallibility and his control over the construction
and dissemination of his content, in this article I propose that his excessive style
extends to his promotional material and redefines for Hitchcock his role as artist
through self-promotion and the potential for both digestion and interpretation of his
work.
For this analysis I will use the terms open and closed text, as well as the term
paratext. My use of open and closed texts is aligned with that proposed by Umberto Eco.
For Eco, in an open text ‘the role of its addressee [has not been] envisaged in
the moment of its generation qua text’ and ‘whose foreseen
interpretation is a part of its generative process.’ (1979, p. 3). Conversely, the closed text is a text of
‘unadulterable specificity’. (p. 49) It refers too to a theoretical
perspective of intertextuality that rejects ‘the idea of self-regulating text by
emphasizing the crucial role intertextual factors play in the semantic actualization of
a text.’ (Klinger, 1989, p. 120) In short,
the closed text has a predisposition to single interpretation, while the open text
offers various or negotiated readings. Significantly, Eco also notes that open texts are
‘reducing such as indeterminacy, whereas closed texts, even though aiming at
eliciting a sort of ‘obedient’ cooperation, are in the last analysis
randomly open to every pragmatic accident.’ (1979, p. 7) Hitchcock trailers, I
will argue, are such pragmatic accidents.
My use of the term paratext aligns most with Gérard Genette’s definition,
namely that it:
Offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back.
[It is a] fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or
less legitimated by the author [and] constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a
zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged
place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence
that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the
services of a better reception for the text and more pertinent reading of it[.]
(1997, p. 2)5
The Hitchcock trailer, as assessed here, is such a transaction, where Hitchcock promotes
closed texts while insinuating their openness. With such trailers I assert that he
attempts to open the paratext – gradually and incrementally offering and
encouraging a polysemantic rendering of ostensibly straightforward products.6
Somewhere between the director’s penchant for controlling his audiences and the
studio’s proclivity to controlling their directors lies a creative-commercial dyad
suggesting that Hitchcock was not merely concerned with how the public viewed his films.
He was concerned, I argue, with how the public viewed him – and as such promoted
his films by embodying their key paratexts, taking ownership in order to generate both
audience size and artistic meaning at the same time. This ambiguity is a by-product of
his self-expression and the thrust of this article: the use of the trailer by a
filmmaker surreptitiously claiming authorship before it would later be bestowed upon
him.7
‘Mr Hitchcock Would Like to Say a Few Words to You’
As a director involved in his own movie marketing, Alfred Hitchcock was a
nonconformist Sella (2002). He seemed always
to have an instinctive understanding of how ‘commodification, as a systematic
operation in mass culture, acts vitally on reception.’ (Klinger, 1989, p. 5) Such understanding began with a conception
of his appearance as visual product.8 Beginning
with the serial-format Alfred Hitchcock Presents… (1955–1962), Hitchcock always seemed
comfortable in front of the camera. His straight-to-audience approach, along with a
consistent and easily recognisable – one might argue branded – tone
combining satire and dread, became his and the show’s calling card.
Hitchcock’s partiality to self-publicity was certainly nothing new. As Robert
Kapsis notes, as early as 1927 Hitchcock, in an open letter to the London
Evening News, made clear that the director was ‘the primary force
in filmmaking’. (1992, p. 20)
Crucially, this force was not, according to Hitchcock, merely a commercial one: the
director ‘already took himself quite seriously as an artist and recognized the
potential of motion pictures as a significant art form.’ (p. 20).
However, in spite of this early sense of creative self-promotion, Hitchcock’s
relationship with his ticket-buying audiences in Britain differed from the
‘strong bond he would so diligently cultivate with American audiences during
the 1950s.’ (p. 21). It was in this period of his career that he ‘used
advance notices, press releases, staged interviews, and newspaper and magazine
articles reportedly authored by himself to instruct audiences on what to expect in a
typical Hitchcock feature film.’ (p. 35–6). Kapsis’s use of the
terms ‘instruct’ and ‘typical’ are telling:
Hitchcock’s assumption of his role as instructor, and his understanding of
what constituted his archetypal product, were established more than a decade before
his move to Hollywood.
By the time of Hitchcock’s arrival in California in the late 1930s, the generic
trailer was already a well-established paratextual phenomenon, as was their
intrinsic mendacity: they were seen as a necessary evil, ‘those unbelievable
concoctions designed to lure customers with adjectives and promises.’ (D. W. C., 1936, p. 4).9 In the post-war period such paratexts pushed this ethos, and
were characterised by what Ambrose Heron refers to as ‘big fonts proclaiming
big things’, a key part of a film’s marketing package but a tactic
primarily used to promote a film’s genre and its on-screen star performers.
(2011) While Hitchcock’s name does not appear in any publicity material in the
early stage of his career in the US, it does appear in voiceover for
Rebecca (1940) and as a
title as early as Saboteur (1942). Within a year, Shadow of
a Doubt is marketed in the possessive: Alfred
Hitchcock’s (Kerzoncuf
2005). He had become a bankable director.
With his name thus woven into his films’ commercial fabric, Hitchcock begins to
become as integral to the trailers as he is to the films. While it is only his name
(again in the possessive) that appears in the trailer for Rope
(1948), it is, as Lisa Kernan notes, a
trailer that departs from typical trailer formulas even as it uses a number of
conventions. (2004, p. 112) The format
includes James Stewart in character speaking directly to the audience and discussing
the film over a series of publicity portraits of its cast, intercut with diegetic
scenes and a quasi-journalistic title that reads NEW YORK, ONE SPRING
AFTERNOON. Stewart here is both cinematic performer and performative
product, and his ‘semi-intradiegetic’ (p. 113) voice-over is meant to
jar audiences out of the happy mood of the preceding scene with its direct, almost
accusatory address, as if we have seen something we were not supposed to. This
method hints at a role later to be taken up by Hitchcock himself, where
Hitchcock-as-storyteller offers greater efficacy of message delivery than does one
of his subjects.10
Beginning with the trailer for The Wrong Man in 1956, Hitchcock begins to appear more
substantially in paratextual products. In this scripted trailer, he narrates with
his by-now familiar direct address to the audience: “Now I’d like you to
meet an entirely different person.” In so doing, he emphasises the scale of
his involvement in a film stylistically different from contemporaneous genre pieces.
The Wrong Man is an adaptation of a text based on a true story,
yet its trailer foregrounds the director’s rendering of such content.
Hitchcock, aware of his status as one of the film’s stars, is in this way what
Johnathan Gray refers to as a ‘generic signifier and intertext’ (2010, p. 51), seamlessly connecting film-as-art
to film-as-product. This is hardly without precedent in Hollywood merchandising,
with stars often appearing ‘as themselves’ in trailers, but in those
cases it might be argued that they are presented as part of the
text rather than its originator.11 This
distinction is key to assessing Hitchcock’s approach to the dissemination of
his products.
For North by Northwest, a higher-budget, altogether glossier affair
than The Wrong Man, MGM opted for traditional trailers without
Hitchcock’s contribution, but his presence in paratextual products remains: on
official posters he appears as a fifth head carved into the face of Mount Rushmore,
site of the film’s climax. The film’s box office showing enhanced
Hitchcock’s growing prerogative to be involved in the marketing of his films
from then on. (Heron, 2011) This is perhaps
because Hitchcock seemed preternaturally to understand the role of the trailer as
one of the ‘epiphenomena’ (Heath, 1977,
p. 28) that are an inseparable part of the packaging of the
film-as-product.
For Psycho, Hitchcock not only gave his name to the trailer, in many
ways he was the trailer, and his screen presence has become almost
indissoluble from the plethora of pop-cultural and connotative images
Psycho has produced. He now had full creative and production
control over the format, and appears in the work much like he did in his television
hosting role: the auteur whose position of privilege is to be in on
the dirty secret, his inimitable narrative tone inviting us to be terrified all the
while remembering not to take such terror too seriously.12
The trailer for Psycho begins with a crane shot of Hitchcock in the
now-famous backlot set for the Bates Motel. He stands in the establishment’s
atrium-like parking lot behind a title that reads: The Fabulous Alfred
Hitchcock is about to escort you… on a tour of the location of his new
motion picture ‘PSYCHO’. Once more, the marketing of the
film resists dropping its would-be audience into the film’s murky and
suffocating diegesis, instead drawing attention to itself as a film
(location, motion picture) – and that film’s maker
before anything else. At the risk of his own unmasking, as Barbara Klinger notes,
Hitchcock actively and self-consciously ‘excorporates the text by activating
and appropriating its elements.’ (1989, p.
7) This activation has the result of blurring the line between text and
paratext, if not entirely obliterating it.
The Psycho trailer barely mentions the film’s genre, with
Hitchcock comfortable initially to eschew composer Bernard Herrmann’s jarring
strings for jaunty music that serves only to reintroduce him as the film’s
creator – a tone apt to his irreverent delivery. It is only when Hitchcock
tells us that this harmless-looking location has become “the scene of a
crime” that this tone shifts to something resembling the genre of the product
being sold, and Herrmann’s composition is at last used. Hitchcock reaches the
famous Bates family home and reminds us that this is where the “most dire,
horrible events took place”. He refers to the film not only in past tense
– contradicting the semantic tense of the trailer, whose province is the
future – but almost as a form of historical record, edifying (his) fictional
narrative to the position of reportage.
The director-as-host method here is unashamedly performative, an approach that for
Hitchcock acts almost like an authorial interview with himself. For if he takes on
the roles of interviewer and interviewee, he appeals not to the film’s largest
market – as the studio would have him do – but to his ideal viewer. This
is because Hitchcock is subverting the ethos of the trailer, namely to trawl the
depths of viewership through broad appeal. Instead, by employing ‘cinematic
detours or “digressions”’ (Klinger, 1989, p. 4), he seeks to ‘structure reception beyond
textual boundaries’ via ‘social and intertextual agencies’.
(Ibid.)
Indeed, Hitchcock structures this reception as he moves around the location like a
tour guide: the jovial music recurs, never fully freeing us from the impudent
presence of the man for whom this space is both workplace and playground. In so
doing, Hitchcock begins to dovetail product and producer as he will in trailers to
come, described later. But, limited to text and originator-of-text, this trailer
contains relatively little of Hitchcock’s creative-intellectual motivation.
The switch between two methods of instruction balances at once the text and the
ownership of that text, an oscillation that exists paradigmatically within a closed
text. And later trailers go on to offer this between two texts: closed and open,
co-existing in the same commercial-conceptual universe.
Three years later comes The Birds, an adaptation of the Daphne du
Maurier novel that remains, given its glossy presentation, largely a closed text
(Du Maurier 2004). Rather
than laying out Hitchcock’s creative objectives, it reconfirms the cycle of
Hitchcock appearing in his own trailers and, with his controller-director status now
recognised, develops into a form of personal product placement: establishing and
re-establishing the brand of ‘the Hitchcock film’, where ‘the
exposure effect’ of such product placement is, Elizabeth Cowley argues, ‘facilitated by repetition’ (in
Shrum, 2012). But the trailer does come
at a time when Hitchcock’s ‘desire to be accepted by both mass and elite
audiences’ (Kapsis, 1992, p. 82) is at
its greatest. This was not merely a case of the studios promoting Hitchcock as
‘the real star’ (p. 83) of The Birds. Hitchcock made it
clear that he ‘did not want the advertising and publicity for the film to
create the impression that [it] was just another film dealing exclusively with the
killing of human beings.’ (p. 85). For Hitchcock, this was a more important
film artistically: it was a ‘more elevating film than
Psycho.’ (Ibid.)
The trailer features Hitchcock once more introducing himself, and this time what he
calls his “latest lecture” about birds and their relationship with
humankind. Again, the tone is decidedly and inappropriately tongue-in-cheek:
Hitchcock describes birds as “our good friends”. This is of course
Hitchcock at his most ironic: his soothing words are counterpointed by images of
humans abusing birds in different ways. Hitchcock downplays the film’s
narrative diegesis in favour of its predominant theme. He does not merely present
The Birds; he positions himself politically on the side of the
film’s collective antagonist by reminding himself that it is humans, as
aggressors against nature, who have had it coming. It is high time, he seems to be
saying, that the birds exacted their revenge on us for our consistent brutality. If
the wrongfully accused protagonist is a Hitchcockian familiar, here the director
comes to the defence of the wrongfully accused antagonist: innocent birds driven to
the edge by hostile homo sapiens. This is moralistic and
interpretive and – save for the film’s apocalyptic ending – a
diversion from the primary aim of the film’s funders, namely to sell the film
with shock tactics.
It is an example of the closed text made open not through ambiguity per se, but with
the potential for inverting the hero-villain duality, and thus offering a momentary
opening of the closed text: eschewing this inversion for a sublimation of narrative
and theme into an expression of ideas. By emphasising theme over narrative,
Hitchcock intimates that the trailer might act as harbinger of artistic
assertion.
From Psycho onwards, these trailers have a unifying style:
Hitchcock’s appearance as ‘host’, a tonal hybrid of
auteur irony and generic mood, and a revelation of the product
not just as a narrative that suspends belief but as the result of the craft of a
cinematic producer, where it is the film itself rather than the entertainment made
manifest. But pre-Marnie trailers differ in that their methodology
works principally as paratext, or ‘texts that accompany a text as part of its
dissemination.’ Klinger (1989, p. 4)
They sell Hitchcock films without resembling or entirely revealing their secrets
– closed paratexts for closed texts. However, from the paratextual materials
of his works following The Birds there is a palpable shift in his
‘allegiance from the general public to a more elitist and or intellectual
audience.’ (Kapsis, 1992, p. 67) And,
in Marnie, this reaches its height as Hitchcock’s excessive
style begins to render his text open. The resultingly open paratext, with Hitchcock
as originator, offers clues to this openness: the director is no longer the stand-in
journalistic host – he becomes the self-reflexive witness to his own artistic
immoderations.
Excess as polysemantic style
The most commonly used Marnie trailer begins with a shot of
Hitchcock atop a camera crane, with the studio’s publicity-friendly
director-star once more as de facto narrator. As the crane
descends, Bernard Herrmann’s lush instrumentation accompanies
Hitchcock’s straight-to-camera introduction, his Leytonstone accent clipped at
the edges by a Californian twang. “How do you do?” he asks, “I am
Alfred Hitchcock and I’d like to tell you about my latest motion picture,
Marnie, which will be coming to this theatre soon.” Then,
flush with self-confidence and unapologetic to the point of tactlessness, without
skipping a beat he continues: “Marnie is a very difficult
film to classify. It is not Psycho. Nor do we have a horde of birds
flapping about pecking at people willy-nilly.” In just two sentences,
Hitchcock has succeeded in talking up his oeuvre under the assumption that it has
entered popular consciousness, all the while debunking his work and making a mockery
of film publicity by wantonly making the very trailer in which he appears instantly
redundant.13
And then: “We do have two very interesting human specimens: a man and a woman.
One might call Marnie a ‘sex-mystery’. That is, if one
used such words. But it is more than that. Perhaps the best way to tell you about
the picture is to show you a few scenes.” The planting of the term
‘sex-mystery’ in the minds of 1960s audiences cannot be underestimated,
painting the scenes that follow with the brush of a genre not yet imagined –
and attempting to apply a new taxonomy to a well-worn marketing product, one that by
now includes Hitchcock himself. By reclassifying, Hitchcock declassifies.
“This is Mark, coming down the stairs of his family home outside
Philadelphia,” Hitchcock continues somewhat unhelpfully over images of what he
describes: Sean Connery descending a staircase. “He is a thoughtful man, dark
and brooding,” the director explains, as Connery looks at the camera in his
churlish, insouciant way. It is footage shot exclusively for the trailer; a revival
of the Hollywood star ‘playing themselves’. “He is, in a sense, a
hunter.”
“And this is what he is hunting.” Cue a pair of similarly commodified
legs, the kind of legs Hitchcock made his province, in a grey pencil skirt moving
down a more workaday staircase. “Marnie – seeing her in her
mother’s modest house, one wonders how two such different people could cross
paths.” Tippi Hedren is revealed, Hitchcock’s objectified
“this”, similarly breaking the fourth wall with arms folded in
dilettantish defiance. “It was certainly not Marnie’s idea.” We
cut to Marnie in less glamorous guise stealing wads of cash from an office safe.
“Marnie was going about her own business like any normal girl,”
Hitchcock smirks, now painfully wry and self-deprecating in the seemingly limitless
comprehension of his own sense of dramatic irony. “Happy. Happy.
Happy.”
We return to Sean Connery’s patriarchal Mark Rutland, glowering at Marnie from
behind his desk, a backlot storm crashing behind his expensive drapes.
“Suddenly into this colourful life comes Mark.” Next, we see
Marnie’s irrational reaction to lightning, and the natural conclusion of the
man who must possess his female partner: “At first, he didn’t know what
to make of Marnie.” Marnie screams, a Hitchcockian blonde as the director
would have her: gleefully in peril and torment. “She does seem a rather
excitable type. What would account for this strange behaviour?” This, as with
the Psycho trailer, is a faux-investigation made with the cover of
crude wit: “Has she just realised that she forgot her umbrella?” The
lightning flashes red now, a moment of potentially alienating and excessive style
not usually included in a trailer. “The colours! Stop the colours!”
Marnie wails. Mark: “What colours?” The voice of Hitchcock returns like
that of a clinical psychologist changing tack in an unproductive therapy session
– “Marnie’s trouble goes deeper than that” – before an
entire tree crashes through a Georgian windowpane, sending wood, fake glass and
suspension of disbelief scattering across the Persian rug. “Far
deeper.”
The inevitable sophomoric relationship with sex – one that Hitchcock usually
kept to visual arrangements, perhaps most notably in North by
Northwest’s phallic final shot of a train entering a tunnel
– is here expressed in words: “And this is the problem which Mark must
probe. But first, something must be done to calm this girl.” Robert
Burks’s camera moves into an extreme close-up as Mark kisses Marnie.
“Our hero applies mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But that may give you the
impression that this picture is all sex and no mystery. Not so at all.”
The scene cuts to a racetrack, where a man has recognised the shapeshifting
recidivist Marnie and threatens her with discovery. “Here, for example, Marnie
is speaking to… uh… I’m not sure who, actually. But he is a man
from her past, a past she seems to be denying.” Enough of that. Marnie and
Mark are kissing once more. Hitchcock: “Oh dear, they’re at it again.
Let me assure you that this is all in the spirit of investigation.” The scene
now cuts to Marnie and Mark, driving. “And this? Here is further proof that
Marnie is a talking picture.” Marnie: “You don’t love me.
I’m just something you’ve caught. You think I’m some kind of
animal you’ve trapped.” Mark: “That’s right, you are. And
I’ve caught something really wild this time, haven’t I? I’ve
tracked you and caught you and by God I’m going to keep you.”
Hitchcock returns, half embarrassed – “That should be quite enough. If
you wish to hear more you will have to buy a ticket.” – and over the
film’s notorious rape scene exclaims: “As for which one is a wild
animal, there are times when I’m not sure.” For a man deeply involved in
the perception of his audiences, it is a moment of astonishingly adroit
condescension. As Mark rips off Marnie’s clothes, Hitchcock remarks: “I
don’t think that was necessary,” as though his own characters are beyond
his control. Yet the director found this moment indispensable to the trailer.
“Actually, I think I should withhold comment, since I’m not certain I
understand this scene. I shall leave the explanation to your own vivid
imagination,” Hitchcock says, perhaps calling on the collusive gaze of the
audience. “It would appear that Mark has a single solution for all
problems,” he goes on. “This is not so. Mark is a complex man, dark and
forbidding. He can also be kind and considerate. And he is also a troubled
man.”
Now Marnie, some kind of hysterical impediment to the ‘troubles’ plaguing
her husband, is (via crude back projection) on horseback and galloping towards a
wall. She is hurtling to disaster. “Troubled because he cannot seem to unravel
the mystery of the girl called… Marnie.” As Marnie and the horse appear
to crash into the wall, the screen explodes in a series of animated titles:
IS Alfred Hitchcock’s MARNIE
……………. A SEX STORY…?
……………. A MYSTERY…?
……………. A DETECTIVE
STORY…?
……………. A ROMANCE…?
……………. A STORY OF A
THIEF…?
……………. A LOVE STORY…?
…YES
AND MORE!
These titles, with their interrogative tone, become the embodiment of
Hitchcock’s career-long attempts at both audience manipulation and stylised
intrusion. It is the apotheosis of a tradition of trailers consecutively signalling
Hitchcock’s claims to authorship. With its director’s hosting of the
diegetic space and reference to the film in historical-biographic or anecdotal
terms, the Hitchcock trailer contradicts the ethos of the classical trailer format,
where the artifice should never be revealed in order to sustain illusory portrayal
of the textual product. The Marnie trailer fully embraces this
paradox, offering neither a surfeit of narrative information nor mis-selling.
Instead it defers to a key Hitchcockian motive: an expression of the film’s
theme, tone and style as somehow intrinsic to its understanding and its character
– the text as paratext.
Ambiguity as paratextual mythmaking
This conflation of the roles and positioning in the production continuum of text and
paratext is in large part a result of the ambiguity of the trailer’s
presentation – embodied best in its attempt to offer up at least six different
genres, a hybrid classification analogous to the ambiguity with which Hitchcock
approaches his subject matter. But it is also where the excesses that begin with
Psycho and The Birds reach their apex with
Marnie. The shop-soiled Hitchcock devices recur – the icy
blonde, violence, sexual power dynamics, simple psychology to explain complex
aberrant behaviour – but, as they emerge as an agent of Hitchcockian style
previously underemphasised, here they fully flesh out the idea of ambiguity as
formal component.
So, if their trailers are a by-product of personal involvement in narrative and a
rupture in cinematic realism, then the closed texts they attempt to open have an
overflowing of excess that inevitably call upon the director and becomes the centre
of the ambiguous meaning of the films. The Marnie trailer thus
offers perhaps the fullest range of Hitchcockian tropes that prior to the film were
scattered variously through his oeuvre but here exist in their entirety. As such,
the Hitchcock trailer has the role of distilling his films into ideas and themes
existing principally to support the Hitchcockian universe.
All of this is in line with Hitchcock’s deployment of paratexts for his own
ends, and perhaps why in the Marnie trailer he describes his
protagonists as “very interesting human specimens”. This creative
taxonomy calls to mind how Klinger notes Barthes’s theoretical perspective of
intertextuality (1975) as depicting ‘a
kind of textus interruptus, a narrative consistently subject to
intertextual interferences that result in meaningful excursions from the text during
the process of its reading.’ (1989, p. 6) The Marnie trailer
described here is such a textus interruptus: analogous to the film
it markets not as a precis of its source material, but in that it reproduces
Hitchcockian paratextual conventions. In these conventions diegetic causality is
eschewed in favour of enigmatic elements, direct address to the audience and
(special) footage only to be seen by trailer spectators. In this way, the Hitchcock
trailer generates interest not in its promise of exciting entertainment or its star
performers, but rather in the ‘suspenseful workings of the basically known
story primarily by evoking its transgressive elements and heightening the shock
value.’ (Kernan, 2004, p. 115)
Hitchcock’s red fade is one such transgressive element, shown in the trailer to
be somehow beyond his own comprehension. It draws our attention to both the putative
cinematic author and the cinematic medium, because we know the diegetic world has
not suddenly turned red – we are at the mercy of Hitchcock’s
manipulation of celluloid. The violence of this extradiegetic shift turns our
attention to the material support and, consequently, to the director. As the film
draws attention to technique, cinematic plausibility is lost and acts in opposition
to the dream-selling role of trailers. It is a moment of excess as knowing disunity
of style.14
Such devices did not go unnoticed or unpunished. Contemporaneous critics attacked the
film for its unrealistic décor, tacky special effects and odd camera angles.
(Moral, 2002, p. 165) The aforementioned
storm exemplifies this criticism, which questioned why the scene was played without
a modicum of plausibility. The lightning of the storm flashes in the same red as
earlier used in the dissolves, action thematically in the tradition of Sirkian
melodrama but also a Hitchcockian wink at pure formalism: style for style’s
sake. This means once more that for Hitchcock the trailer serves the marketing of
the film (an explanation of what it is about), but only as second fiddle to his
expressionistic treatment. (Wood, 2002, p.
211) He indulges his tastes to relinquish the rigours of the
‘invisible’ diegesis to draw attention to style and technique and to
remind us that we are watching a film, again something that seems counter-intuitive
to the purpose of a trailer.
But at this point in his career Hitchcock is no longer burdened by a need to satisfy
the imperative of studio-system filmmaking – he is able to deploy an open
text. Marnie ‘failed miserably at the box office’
(Kapsis, 1992, p. 67) and was, for the
most part, poorly received by critics. Eugene Archer in The New York
Times described the film as:
[T]he master’s most disappointing film in years (…) A strong
suspicion arises that Mr. Hitchcock is taking himself too seriously –
perhaps the result of listening to too many esoteric admirers. Granted that
it’s still Hitchcock – and that’s a lot – dispensing
with the best in acting, writing and even technique is sheer indulgence. When a
director decides he’s so gifted that all he needs is himself, he’d
better watch out. (1964, cited by Moral 2002, p. 166)
Archer criticises Hitchcock for placing himself and his reputation before the needs
the film, namely the supposed duty on the part of the filmmaker to care about his
audience and tell a good story. Rather than critiquing the film on its merits or
demerits, Archer objects to the film precisely because of the perception that
Hitchcock’s presence should be enough of a reason for it to be viewed, a fact
borne out by the presentation of this and his earlier trailers. But as later, more
favourable reviews show, a shift begins to occur in the perception of Hitchcock and
the reinterpretation of his canon, in which his recurring themes, ideas, motifs and
preoccupations come to form the hallmarks of his singularity of vision and his
‘art’. The role of the trailer changes concomitantly: designed as a film
package, it becomes an epigraph.
To this end, Hitchcock seemed not only to understand the liminal space between art
(or at least auteurship) and the cinema industry, but positioned
himself as arbiter of that space. By appearing as the author introducing his own
work, he sidesteps both Adorno and Horkheimer’s warning about the denial of
art (which the studio system embodies) and Barthes’s author-death (1977), embracing ‘Foucault’s concept
of the author function [that] allows a middle ground, wherein the author is denied
outright authority, but exists as a discursive entity that channels and networks
notions of value, identity, coherence, skill, and unity.’ (Gray, 2010, p. 109). In this way, Hitchcock is
the trailer itself, reasserting its function and his role as creator and
determinant. And, in the absence of other tools of generic marketing (with the case
of Marnie as a glaring example), the studio defers to these
elements in the director’s toolkit and hopes audiences respond in kind.
Paratextual Subterfuge
Decades later, reviewer Jonathan McCalmont would describe Marnie as
‘wonderful’, focusing on its multi-layered, unashamedly frank approach
to psychoanalysis. He writes:
[Marnie] is not only a fascinating character study, but also a
meditation upon the moral status of psychoanalysis as an activity. So, while
Marnie is a film that openly accepts a Freudian vision of
psychological dysfunction, it is also a film that knows that not everyone is so
easily read. (McCalmont, 2009)
McCalmont’s serious appraisal of the film’s themes and the styles it uses
to evoke these are thus a far cry from the film’s first reception; why the
shift? I would argue that this is not merely down to a changing cultural
perspective, nor indeed empty nostalgia for the hidden gems to be found in
retrospectively reassessed films. Rather, this reappraisal of mainstream cultural
artifacts amounts to a legitimation of Hitchcock within academic discourse, with the
result that Marnie can be read as both an entertainment and a drama
dealing with dark themes in ambiguous ways. This might go some way to explaining how
(and why) Hitchcock wilfully committed what might be considered – at least in
commercial terms – the principal faux pas of any trailer:
deliberately making it unclear to audiences what the film was about. As a studio
picture, Marnie is sui generis designed as a
closed text. This closure is key to its commodification, and any paratext that forms
part of its marketing must be intrinsically linked to this state of closure;
interpretation is not marketable, nor indeed can marketisation be open to
interpretation.15
Vertigo was marketed (without the presence of Hitchcock) as a genre
picture but performed poorly at the box office; it was a critical success primarily
thanks to its retrospectively polysemous interpretation.16 Apparently stung by that experience, the studios supported
Hitchcock’s re-emergence in the trailers of the films that followed, to great
success. Marnie, given its glossy presentation and bankable stars,
begins as a closed text and is turned open by Hitchcock in the trailer. In so doing,
Hitchcock, it might be said, is protecting his material from what Klinger describes
as the ‘social environment that subjects it to interference and dissociation
from its original authorial intent.’ (1989, p.
8) So, to what extent was his determination from Psycho
onwards to begin to open closed texts – grounded in ambiguity – the
basis for such reappraisal?
There is a sense that he believed his integrity – whether in the form of
entertainment, incipient meaning or critical acclaim – could only be
maintained if a work were open, regardless of its production context, because
‘the open work is able to ward off these social intrusions because of its
difficult form, and it thus maintains a closer bond with the sender of the
message.’ (Ibid.) Hitchcockian style as plot device becomes a mark of intent:
his attempt at safeguarding the polysemanticity of his work. As an extension of the
psychological musings of Psycho and The Birds,
Marnie is not just a film with narrative elements of psychoanalysis, it
is ‘explicitly coloured by psychoanalysis.’ (Heath, 1977, p. 29) Hitchcock thus seems to argue that a film
about psychoanalysis needs to be as open to interpretation as is the discipline used
to unlock its mystery.
Perhaps most tellingly, Marnie was a commercial failure as well. Was
this a result of the studio failing to support it, or confusing audiences with a
‘suspenseful sex-mystery’ that promised too much? It is hard to say, but
only four films followed for Hitchcock, each as critically undistinguished as the
next even with the revisionism of academic hindsight. Marnie turned
out to be the ne plus ultra of a career that had seen commercial
and stylistic highs and lows. That this was a high point is evidenced by the
successive disappointments that would follow, and by the trailers that accompanied
them.
Torn Curtain (1966) came
next, a curious confection of spy thriller, romance and soap opera, with Brian
Moore’s screenplay and Julie Andrews’s miscasting – along with her
lack of on-screen chemistry with Paul Newman – largely to blame for the
alienating effect the film had on viewers.17
Hitchcock was not involved in its trailer.
For Topaz (1969), he
reappears in a split-screen configuration alongside the trailer narrator and
diegetic extracts, from which we are asked: “Does the name
Topaz mean anything to you?” Hitchcock responds with:
“A story of espionage in high places.” Even with his career on the wane,
the director remains the drawcard here: no star name is quoted other than his.
Indeed, the film offers us the somewhat obscure promise that, for this film
Hitchcock tops Hitchcock. But for this fleeting line, Hitchcock
does not appear in person or in voice for the rest of the trailer, which follows a
classical format of diegetic footage/generic narrator, while posing questions about
the mystery at its heart without answering them. Hitchcock does not answer these
questions or claim that Topaz might be anything other than a closed
text. There is no marketing gimmick here: the answer to what ‘Topaz’
might be is contained in the film’s diegesis and not in the preoccupations or
excesses of a director-presenter.
Then, in 1972, Hitchcock appears in the
trailer for Frenzy. His introduction is a recreation of the opening
scene of the film, a black comedy moment in which a city official promises to clean
the Thames of the “waste products of our society” and that it will carry
“no foreign bodies”, shortly before a corpse bobs ashore. Here, however,
the body is substituted with Hitchcock’s: a floating, talking cadaver who to
camera intones: “I dare say you are wondering why I am floating around London
like this. I am on the famous Thames river… investigating a murder. Rivers can
be very sinister places, and in my new film Frenzy, this river you
may say is the scene of a very horrible murder.”
The scene cuts back to Frenzy’s diegesis, and the floating
corpse of its introductory scene for which Hitchcock was doubling. Once more,
producer-as-paratext and text-as-product intermingle, and as Hitchcock reminds us
“one can never be sure where danger lurks”, he plays detective:
“My investigation led me to this innocent alley, of which there are hundreds
in London, but I don’t think we should stay long, something unpleasant is
about to happen.” While the jocular tone offers some polysemantic
interpretation, suddenly this shtick feels shop-worn, as the
trailer cuts to what is in many ways the film’s most discussed scene, in which
Hitchcock’s camera moves into a building with the murderer and his next
victim, following them through a gloomy corridor and up the stairs before retreating
down the same path as if too horrified to witness the crime, forcing the audience to
construct it in their imagination. Such camerawork draws attention to itself and,
once more, to Hitchcock, and its use – beyond any sense of practicable film
language – is deliberately open to interpretation. One such is that of Gilles
Deleuze, who unravels the scene thus: ‘She went in free, but cannot expect any
help - the murder is inexorable’. (1986, p.
19) It is an open intertextual moment in a closed paratext. Yet the
trailer does not allude to this momentary intrusion of the film’s author,
reducing the movement to its generic origins. In the midst of Hitchcock’s
decline, could it be that his influence over his paratexts, and the ambiguity sewn
into their style, had lessened too?
With his tongue-in-cheek tone pushed to the point of self-parody, in one of the
trailers for Family Plot (1976), his final feature, Hitchcock reappears. Sweeping a graveyard, he
is introduced by a generic narrator, who offers: “The master of suspense,
Alfred Hitchcock, is involved in a family plot.” Hitchcock jokes about his
credentials as a spiritualist before peering into a crystal ball in which his
directing credit appears, a name he finds “strangely familiar”. He then
looms in front of a back projection, gasping “My word!” at the sight of
an old woman kicking over a headstone – a merging of film and trailer footage
again conflating text and paratext. “What a grave insult,” Hitchcock
continues, evoking the gallows humour of The Trouble with Harry.
Hitchcock goes on to introduce the film’s characters – “live
ones” as he calls them – before the narrator takes over, imploring us to
find the answers to the questions Hitchcock poses on the back of a ticket stub.
Hitchcock’s role here has been reduced to a gimmick: a faux-narrator, or
irresponsible creator whose appearance is to sell tickets but not to explain why
they should be bought, or to open up any possible interpretations.
Thus, the potential for polysemanticity, or indeed allusions to thematic ambiguity,
brought up in earlier trailers and gradually lessened in
post-Marnie iterations, proposes in the construction of
Hitchcockian paratexts an intersection of the materialism of the commercial package
and the abstraction of artistic ambition. Given the depth of its performative
nature, his trailers iteratively border on spoof with respect to their abstruseness,
where ‘the artistry of authorial intent and the machinations of commercialism
are woven together.’ (Hesford, 2013) As
such, they represent an ever-shifting bellwether in not only Hitchcock’s
career, but also the degree to which he maintained control of his semantic products
– and how they were to be disseminated and interpreted.
Given the costly failures at the twilight of his career, if Hitchcock’s
trailers can be seen as analogous to his cinematic output, in the absence of formal
explanation they remain something of an oddity – outliers even in the varied
output of a director for whom actors should be ‘treated like cattle’.
(Scott & Truffaut, 1985, p. 140) In
many ways, Hitchcock’s obscurantism is a symptom (or by-product) of marketing
methods that collectively represent filmmaking myths emphatically revealed: the
three-card trick convincing us not just to pay for what we’re seeing, but to
understand what it might be worth.
Such a critique of the idiosyncratic nature of trailers has the potential to act as
corollary to the uniqueness of films in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as well as to the
canon of other directors making similar claims to authorship.18 As I have attempted to show, such an analysis offers
speculation and a reconsideration of directorial ‘epiphenomena’. It
therefore has ramifications not just for a reassessment of Hitchcock’s work as
being understood in terms of its full scope, namely the tension between text and
paratext, but also for other filmmakers to engage in similar paratextual subterfuge
wherever the codified use of closed-text marketing for open-text work persists.
Posters carried the somewhat baffling genre description of “Suspenseful Sex
Mystery”.
Decades of financial (and therefore creative) insecurity for Hitchcock came to an
end with his signing of a Paramount contract in 1954. Here, agent and studio
executive Lew Wasserman was ‘able to escalate all the terms, protecting
Hitchcock’s independence and autonomy; improving his salary, expenses, and
perks; and implementing profit and (finally) gross percentages that put
Hitchcock on a par with any director in Hollywood.’ McGilligan (2003, p. 478). This decade of relatively
unimpeded creative and commercial freedom included work with other studios, such
as MGM, from 1958. (p. 565)
Prior to 1960, Hitchcock’s name
appears frequently in trailers for his films, and the director appears in
several trailers as himself, either through voiceover or in person. Such films
include Rear Window (1954) and The Wrong Man (1956).
This canonisation did not seem to sit well with everyone. An Evening
News critic of the time of Marnie’s release
asked: ‘Has high-brow [sic] praise in Les Cahier [sic]
du Cinéma gone to his head?’ Moral (2002, p. 164).
For more on this usage, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts
(1997).
It is worth noting that for several films listed here, more than one trailer was
produced. The trailer to which I refer is therefore not necessarily the only
such example, but has content apposite to this discussion, namely the
paratextual product Hitchcock deployed for polysemantic style.
For more on this theoretical context, see Hitchcock and Gottlieb (1997).
The sub-heading above is the title text from the introduction to the trailer,
hosted by Hitchcock, for The Birds (1963).
For a broader context of contemporaneous and current promotional policies in
Hollywood, see Wernick (1991), pp.
263–268; and Marich (2005), pp.
8–12.
Hitchcock was reputed to have had creative control of most of his trailers, and
although this trailer was made by the Warner Bros. trailer department (which
after 1940 had a contract with NSS as well but still produced trailers), we can
assume that for the most part, Hitchcock made it. See Kernan (2004, p. 256, n36.).
A notable contemporaneous example is the trailer for Magnificent
Obsession (Douglas Sirk,
1954). Jane Wyman, the film’s star, appears by picking up a
copy of the film’s source material – the Lloyd C. Douglas novel of
the same name. Wyman talks about being “so thrilled to be have been
selected” to appear in the film, but, in spite of Sirk’s later
canonical re-assessment (in the Hitchcock mould), the emphasis here is on the
film’s performers and its literary as opposed to cinematic author. The
‘big font’ title refers to Lloyd C. Douglas’s
Magnificent Obsession. Indeed, the trailer makes no mention
of Douglas Sirk.
Hitchcock’s assistant Peggy Robertson notes that ‘every Hitchcock
picture was 99.9/100 Hitchcock. It was always Hitch, and the trailers worked the
same way.” Goodwin (1981, p.
87).
“Such was Hitchcock’s elevated status at this point – note how
he literally ascends from a lofty position at the beginning – that he
could refer to his previous films with the expectation that the general audience
would know what he was talking about.” Heron (2011).
The repetition of the same device throughout the film fulfils Kristin
Thompson’s hallmarks for the evidence of excess. Thompson refers to how ‘the repeated use of multiple
devices to serve similar functions tends to minimise the importance of their
narrative implications’. In so doing, Thompson argues, ‘they become
foregrounded primarily through their own innate interest […] and take on
an importance greater than its narrative or compositional function would seem to
warrant.’ (in Braudy and Cohen, eds., 1998,
p. 517) The prominence of Hitchcockian excess in
Marnie seems to have been enough to influence other
directors, including Martin Scorsese, who employed the fade-to-red technique in
his 1991 remake of Cape
Fear, a similarly florid and stylised melodrama. Long-time
Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann scored both films.
Without going into specifics, a marketing manual provided for theatre owners upon
the release of Marnie described Hitchcock as
‘Hollywood’s Master of Cinematic Art’. (Kapsis, 1992, p. 93).
The Vertigo trailer begins with a helpful dictionary definition
of vertigo, before employing the classical format of diegetic scenes re-cut.
Hitchcock does not appear in person or in voice, and while the film’s
themes, such as reincarnation and obsession, are hinted at, the presentation is
that of the thriller genre, as the trailer climaxes with what is the
film’s opening chase scene, offering the title: Only Hitchcock
Could Weave This Tangled Web of Terror.
Richard Schickel, writing in Life Magazine, notes how
Torn Curtain is not a failure because Hitchcock has failed
artistically, in which case one might still be ‘respectfully intrigued by
the gropings of one of the few genuine artists to function successfully in the
commercial cinema.’ Rather than an ambitious failure the film is a
disappointment, where Hitchcock fails ‘through lack of ambition’.
Schickel (1966, p. 17).
A modern equivalent can be drawn with film director Paul Thomas Anderson, a
multiple award-winning filmmaker. Anderson is more involved in his promotional
material than most: he cut his own trailer for his 2012 film The Master, using footage never
included for theatrical release.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Annapurna/The Weinstein
Company. 2012. Trailer: The
Master. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EGSWpBDbho [Accessed 11 Mar.
2018].Barthes,
R. 1975.
. New York:
Hill and Wang.Barthes,
R and
Heath,
S. (eds.) 1977.
. Glasgow:
Fontana.Braudy,
L and
Cohen,
M. (eds.) 1998.
,
5th Edition. New York:
Oxford University Press.Cowley,
E. 2012.
As a Backdrop, Part of the Plot, or a Goal in a Game: The
Ubiquitous Product Placement. In:
Shrum,
LJ (ed.), , 37–65.
New York:
Routledge.Deleuze,
G. 1986 [1983].
, trans.
H.Tomlinson &
B.
Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.Du Maurier,
D. 2004 [1952].
.
London:
Virago.D. W. C.
1936, May10. Renovating the Trailer; Sent to the Cleaners and
Remodeled, the New Blurbs Are Too, Too Genteel. , 2.Eco,
U. 1979.
. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.Genette,
G. 1997.
, trans.
J.E.Lewin.
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.Goodwin,
M. 1981.
The Lost Films of Alfred Hitchcock.
, 84–87.
April 1981.Gray,
J. 2010.
. New York:
New York University Press.Heath,
S. 1977 [1976].
Screen Images, Film Memory.
, 1(1):
27–36.Heron,
A. 2011.
The Evolution of the Hitchcock Trailer.
[online] . Available at:
http://www.filmdetail.com/2011/09/28/the-evolution-of-the-hitchcock-trailer/
[Accessed 11 Feb. 2018].Hesford,
D. 2013.
Action… Suspense… Emotion! The Trailer as
Cinematic Performance. [online] . Available at:
http://framescinemajournal.com/article/action-suspense-emotion-the-trailer-as-cinematic-performance/
[Accessed 16 Mar. 2018].Hitchcock,
A and
Gottlieb,
S. 1997.
.
Berkeley: University of
California Press.Johnston,
KM. 2009.
. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Co.Kapsis,
RE. 1992.
.
London: The University of
Chicago Press.Kernan,
L. 2004.
.
Austin: University of Texas
Press.Kerzoncuf,
A. and Bokor,
N. 2005.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Trailers. [online]
. Available at:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/hitchcocks_trailers/
[Accessed 2 Nov. 2017].Klinger,
B. 1989.
Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass
Culture. ,
28(4):
3–19. Summer, 1989.
DOI: 10.2307/1225392Marich,
R. 2005.
. Burlington,
MA: Focal Press. DOI:
10.4324/9780080491776McCalmont,
J. 2009.
.
[online] Ruthless Culture. Available at:
https://ruthlessculture.com/2009/12/03/marnie-1964-the-abusive-nature-of-therapy
[Accessed 20 Jan. 2018].McGilligan,
P. 2003.
.
Chichester:
Wiley.Moral,
TL. 2002.
.
Maryland: Scarecrow
Press.Paramount Pictures.
1960. Trailer:
Psycho. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8H3rg5GfM [Accessed 12 Feb.
2018].Schickel,
R. 1966,
August26. Review: Torn Curtain.
, 61(9):
17.Scott,
HG and
Truffaut,
F. 1985.
(Revised Edition).
New York: Simon &
Shuster.Sella,
M. 2002.
The 150-Second Sell, Take 34. [online]
. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/the-150-second-sell-take-34.html
[Accessed 15 Mar. 2018].Shrum,
LJ. (ed.) 2012.
, 2nd Edition.
New York:
Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203828588The Selsnick Studio.
1940. Trailer:
Rebecca. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3YJcW2UQiw [Accessed 22 Jan.
2018].Thompson,
K. 1986.
The Concept of Cinematic Excess. In:
Braudy,
L and
Cohen,
M (eds.), ,
513–524, New
York: Oxford
University.Universal International
Pictures. 1954. Trailer:
Magnificent Obsession. [video].
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlz1KlRM5kI [Accessed 13
Apr. 2018].Universal Studios.
1942. Trailer:
Saboteur. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ELyvwPTTk [Accessed 14 Jan.
2018].Universal Studios.
1943. Trailer: Shadow of a
Doubt. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHEu5vXUusc [Accessed 13 Apr.
2018].Universal Studios.
1963. Trailer: The
Birds. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCxR7dlavwg [Accessed 10 Apr.
2018].Universal Studios.
1964. Trailer:
Marnie. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV_2-v_dsAU [Accessed 22 Jul.
2017].Universal Studios.
1966. Trailer: Torn
Curtain. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2TlfRvNh8M [Accessed 8 Mar.
2018].Universal Studios.
1969. Trailer:
Topaz. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1XQH78gwc [Accessed 4 Apr.
2018].Universal Studios.
1972. Trailer:
Frenzy. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gWjZpkkkIs [Accessed 4 Apr.
2018].Universal Studios.
1976. Trailer: Family
Plot. [video]. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVazwgLDFvI [Accessed 6 Apr.
2018].WarnerBros. 1948.
Trailer: Rope. [video].
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkQoH8QbVs [Accessed 11
May 2018].WarnerBros. 1956.
Trailer: The Wrong Man.
[video]. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wpZuOhvrao
[Accessed 5 May 2018].Wernick,
A. 1991.
. London:
Sage. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-22346-6_17Wood,
R. 2002.
. New
York: Columbia University
Press.Filmography (1955–1962). [TV programme].
USA:
AlfredJ.Hitchcock Productions..
(1991). [film] Directed by
M.Scorsese.
USA:
Amblin..
(1964). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Universal
Studios..
(1959). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA:
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer..
(1960). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Paramount
Pictures..
(1954). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Paramount
Pictures..
(1963). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Universal
Studios.. (1956). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Paramount
Pictures..
(1955). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Alfred J. Hitchcock
Productions..
(1956). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Warner
Bros..
(1955). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Paramount
Pictures..
(1958). [film] Directed by
A.Hitchcock.
USA: Alfred J. Hitchcock
Productions.