structural criticism (formal system)

social and political Hitchcock (reflection-of-society approach: sociological and historical criticism)

psychoanalytical criticism

feminist criticism

production of culture approach (industrial model)

reception theory

technical analysis ("how he does it")

Hitchcock and film history

Developed by French film theorists as "politique des auteurs." Among these theorists, several were particularly interested in Hitchcock: Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer.

1. Despite the collaborative nature of movies, a film has an "author," who is the director.

2. As an artist, a director can work within conventional forms and genres and still impose a distinctive "vision" on the films.

"Auteur" critics downplay historical or infrastructural elements to emphasize the "vision" or unified sensibility that structured the film. These critics prefer to examine a director's full body of work, looking for recurring themes, symbols, and motifs that define the auteur's vision. Auteur criticism also tends to prefer directors who worked in conventional genres (suspense, westerns, etc.), because they provide the best opportunities to see how a distinctive sensibility can manifest itself even with cliched material.

Structuralism looks at a film or any other "text" as a signifying system, a set of patterns or relationships. The meaning of a work (or a body of work) comes not so much from inherent meanings of its individual elements, as from how they interrelate within a "formal system."

In Hitchcock studies, structural analysis has emphasized thematic oppositions and other recurring patterns. Various critics have suggested various key patterns: doubling, pursuit and flight, activity and passivity, voyeurism and 'the gaze,' and so on.

Genre, considered as a set of conventional patterns within a basic formula, is one interest in structural criticism. Plot patterns (such as the falsely-accused man) are recurring structural elements related to genre. Film techniques such as subjective (point-of-view) shooting can also be analyzed as structural elements.

Semiotics, a form of structuralism, uses the concept of codes to discuss conventional ways that things are done in texts. Codes are cultural phenomena because they are learned. Nevertheless, through familiarity codes come to seem natural rather than cultural: this process is called "naturalization."

There are various categories of codes, including cultural codes (for example, things that signify masculinity and femininity, or social class) and, in film, technical codes. Technical codes, which describe the ways we have learned to "read" visual information, include such things as point of view and reaction shots, cross-shooting and over-shoulder shooting, dissolves, and montage. Technical codes involve both techniques of making movies and, for viewers, learned ways of seeing them. Technical codes have thematic implications as well: for example, a dissolve suggests a connection between two otherwise-unrelated images.

The sociological approach interprets cinema as a reflection of the society where it was created. As a film grows older, the sociological approach becomes a historical approach.

A key concept of sociological criticism is ideology: the set of beliefs and ways of thinking shared by members of a culture. Marxist-oriented sociology sees ideology as a 'superstructure' that justifies, and also disguises, the real, economic, base of power in the society.

Two preoccupations of sociologically-oriented criticism are gender (sex roles as defined by culture) and class (social status as determined by economic forces). Both emphases have been important in Hitchcock studies.

A third sociological emphasis important in Hitchcock criticism is political ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War (but also World War II and the Great Depression).

Psychoanalytical concepts:

a. Freudian concepts:
- The unconscious: wishes & desires
- Repression & neurosis
- Displacement: the villain is the hero’s displaced desire.
- Oedipal theme
- Freudian developmental stages: oral-anal-genital
- Voyeurism (obsessional investigation)
- Fetishism (overvaluing of an object)

A Doppelganger or double can be an important manifestation in a film of the unconscious, repression, or displacement.

Lacanian concepts:
- The unconscious is structured like a language
- Meaning is endlessly displaced: “difference” is the essence of the world.

- Lacanian Ddvelopmental stages:

Imaginary stage: There is no differentiation between self and other: a maternal world

Mirror stage: The child recognizes itself in a mirror: the ego is born, an image of itself as a masterful whole. However, this recognition is also a mis-recognition because the individual will never attain the wholeness it saw in the mirror: thus the self also creates an alienated self, forever marked by a lack, forever trying to obtain the wholeness seen in the mirror.

Classical film form manifests the patriarchy (male control) of the culture in which it was created.

"The gaze": a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey to characterize cinema as an instrument of male spectatorship. Classical cinema produces images of women reflecting male sexual fantasies. Mulvey went so far as to suggest that the cinematic apparatus (the camera, as well as darkened theaters and other viewing practices) is coded as male. Feminist critics frequently consider filmic point of view (including reaction shots) as an indication of power or control within the movie.

Important feminist concepts in film include:

scopophilia: voyeurism, obtaining pleasure from looking at bodies (particularly female bodies).

fetishism: related to voyeurism, fetishism describes fixation on a body part (such as feet or hair) or on some inanimate object (such as shoes).

objectification: a form of fetishism, turning the gazed-upon woman into an object of male sexual fantasy.

identification: the term used to convey the idea that classical cinema not only takes a male point of view, but also assumes a male spectator. By identifying with the gaze of the the male characters and the camera, the male spectator achieves ego-gratification.

resistance: contrasting term to identification. The concept is that, because classical cinema does not allow women characters to take active roles as desiring sexual beings, women spectators cannot identify with what they see and therefore must assume a position of resistance against the male gaze.

The production of culture approach to film emphasizes the making of movies as an industrial process. (It is also known as the infrastructural approach because it emphasizes the internal workings of the film business.) The most fully developed industrial model was the Hollywood studio system, which Hitchcock worked in for over 25 years. (His work in the European and British film industries of the 1920s and 1930s provides a somewhat different model.) The production of culture approach is contrary to the auteur theory, in that it emphasizes filmmaking as a collaborative process as well as a business.

Criticism following the industrial model emphasizes the three-stage process of pre-production, production, and post-production--in Hitchcock's case, his collaboration with writers, producers, editors, publicists, and others in creating films. A very important part of the studio era was the star system, which affected Hitchcock's selection and use of actors.

Reception theory, also known as the reader-response approach, gives an essential role to the viewer (or 'reader'), rather than treating the "text" as a unique entity separate from readings of it. This approach considers meaning as something produced, "negotiated," or "fabricated" by an interaction of the film with its viewer. In other words, reception theory analyzes the reading of a text as a communicative process.

Reception theorists emphasize the "horizon of expectations" that a viewer brings to a film or any other text. These expectations are determined both by the human perceptual apparatus and by the "interpretive community" that any individual viewer is a part of. Members of an interpretive community share previous textual experiences as well as cultural assumptions; this shared background leads individuals within the community to approach and interpret particular texts in similar, predictable ways. Among the shared artistic factors are genre (considered as a set of expectations for a familiar film type), the artist's reputation (Hitchcock as "the Master of Suspense"), and infrastructural factors such as marketing and publicity. Ideology comprises shared cultural and social assumptions within the community.

Although reception theory deemphasizes the idea that a text has one correct interpretation, it also rejects the notion that all interpretations are equally valid. Some theorists suggest that the rhetorical or semiotic organization of any text (the way it is put together) creates an "ideal reader." Any actual reader can approaches this ideal through "competence," a product of experience, the interpretive community, and ideology.

Two reception theorists developed ways of approaching the anomaly that responses by various readers are both similar and different. E. D. Hirsch makes a distinction between meaning and significance. Meaning is the stable quality of any text and precedes interpretation, whereas significance varies depending on context. Different readers at different times achieve varying significance from texts, though meaning remains stable.

Wolfgang Iser holds that any text provides numerous perspectives on its material, but also leaves gaps or blanks that need to be filled in by each reader. Any text is indeterminate until a reader chooses (negotiates meaning) among the various possibilities that the work allows.

Reception theory has connections to all the theories above, but has drawn particularly on sociological and structuralist thinking. Sociological theory provides the concept of ideology as what constitutes interpretive communites. Structuralism and semiotics identify patterns of expectation (such as genre) and learned codes such as point of view.

See analyses of particular scenes in films, in the Gallery section.