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Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzalès, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future. New York: Routledge, 2004. pp. 284. $104.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.
Hitchcock: Past and Future consists of a selection of papers originally delivered at the 1999 gala, "Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration," organized to commemorate the hundredth birthday of its venerable subject. The volume is edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, members of the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, which hosted the event.
As Allen explains in his introduction, the conference was not intended as a conventional scholarly symposium, but as an unabashed act of reverence for a body of work and for the figure largely responsible for it. This celebratory approach, Allen continues, was meant to counter the "threat by certain contemporary scholars who seem intent on reducing the study of film to an analysis of how they are received by audiences, circulate in culture, and reflect or resonate with other kinds of cultural forms and social processes" (2).
The event, as I can attest (having been there), was indeed a celebration. It brought together not only scholars but actors and writers who had contributed to Hitchcock's films. It even featured an appearance by Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia, who, though she spoke little, served, in the terms of some of the essays in this collection, as a kind of quasi-taxidermic representation of the Master.
The essays in this volume cannot relay the full spirit of that Centennial Celebration, which was as much about the buzz of Hitchcockian enthusiasm as it was about analyzing the films. Still, these pieces have the benefit of being, for the most part, pithier than the usual run of essays in a scholarly collection-reason for celebration in itself. And though expanded in many cases from their original form, they are still relatively brief, maintaining the lucidity required when ideas must be relayed to a large, fairly diverse audience (something Hitchcock, of course, knew more than a little about). All the essays are provocative in some way, and attest to the fact that Hitchcock's films are an endless source of ingenious readings, both regarding their own creation, the meaning of their cultural context, and, more generally still, the limits and possibilities of meaning itself.
The editors have divided the...