A Long Hard Look at Psycho (BFI Film Classics) - Softcover

Durgnat, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0851709206 ISBN 13: 9780851709208

Publisher: British Film Institute, 2008

Synopsis

In an American Film Institute poll in 2001, Psycho was voted the greatest thriller of all time. Its scenes and characters are among the most iconic in all cinema.
Alfred Hitchcock was prompted to make Psycho after seeing Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1954), which took the thriller genre to a new level of shock-value. Not to be undone, Hitchcock adapted a pulp novel by Robert Bloch with a view to pulling off an unprecedented feat of audience manipulation.
The result was a triumph, the talk of the moviegoing world in 1960. But most of the talk, then and since, has been about the twist. In spite of the widespread acknowledgment of Hitchcock's and his collaborators' achievements on Psycho, its complexity and sophistication as cinema aren't fully appreciated.
In this book, Raymond Durgnat shows the extent of the achievement. In a meticulous analysis, he explores all the elements that make up this remarkable film. He also develops various lines of argument--about spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psychoanalysis, editing and shot-composition, among other themes--that amount to a reinvention of cinema studies.
With more than 150 illustrations, A Long Hard Look at Psycho is likely to become the definitive book on its subject and an indispensible contribution to the study of Hitchcock.

About this title

About the Author:

The author of one of the seminal works of Hitchcock criticism, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974), Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) was one of Britain's pre-eminent writers on cinema. Among his writings are books on Buñuel, Franju, Renoir, sexual alienation in the cinema, and a study of WR - Mysteries of the Organism for the BFI Modern Classics series (1999). He is Visiting Professor at the University of East London.

Review:

"Durgnat's final work -- as much performance art or perilous high-wire act as textual explication -- goes a long way towards transforming Hitchcock's masterpiece into a fundamentally new film."--"Cinema Scope"

About this edition

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0851709206
• ISBN 13: 9780851709208
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256