Hitchcock's Cryptonymies Volume 2. War Machines
Tom Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 318
ISBN: 2:00080104
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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. Cohen offers an unprecedented guide to the entirety of Hitchcock's labyrinthine signature system.
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into cinematic mnemonics. • Second, the titular direction involves an irreversible loss of aura and anthropomorphism, echoed in the directive to "think thin." Thornhill moves from tropological traffic jams to a site where asolar machines attack from the sky and where the anthropomorphism of earth is withdrawn from stone faces. Think thin, think very thin, beyond the traffic and transport of metaphor or advertising language. Thornhill, who enters as "Grant" posing as the last man of the
to ignite, posthumously, a different critical perspective on the dimensions of what he was doing. I had at the time been writing a dissertation chapter on Plato, an interminable and micrological essay that explored why or how the "Platonic" reading inverted what was demonstrably going on in the text—and the implications of how inverse interpretation can install itself in or as histories (metaphysics). I put this aside for a month, during which I chanced into what I thought were movies at the Quad
by northwest," while appropriating a line of Hamlet's, names a nonexistent direction, an "impossible" direction that leads not only to the border over which the micrologies inside a pre-Columbian figure would pass but to what seems the edge of an earth space. It has to do with the cinematic (microfilm, transport, Mount Rushmore) yet shifts performativity from the usual play-withina-play logic to a voiding precipice before personification or aura can be dissembled.5 62 A Performativity without
fruit cellar in drag ("He's a transvestite," blurts the deputy later), he not only looks like a diva but is held back, restrained by Sam Loomis, in the attitude of the Laocoon, that is, as a figure of the aesthetic's inability to speak or act, but also its inability not to project itself in the mode of theater, the inmixing 90 Phoenix Rex of personifications of the dead and an aperformativity without ground. Norman's inversion of classical aesthetics in caberet mockery, with a cinematic
are acrobats, an LP record and a concert in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). There's fireworks and fancy dress in To Catch a Thief (1955)."u But this notion was already implied in Hitchcock's first cameo, in The Lodger. There he is set in a glass booth as seeming editor of a newsroom (imprinting as recording) and before giant printing press gears followed by the disseminating teletype and wireless machines. Friedrich Kittler has tracked this association of telegraphy and cinema extensively with-