Preface to the First Edition

Summary

In 1982, Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze was published, the culmination of a project that had occupied me for ten years. During that period, I had published other essays on films and filmmakers. These had appeared in widely scattered journals, and at the time I submitted the Hitchcock manuscript I resolved to collect them in one volume, along with a number of papers presented at conferences but never published. The “I” of the Camera is the product of that resolution, although half its essays were written in the intervening five years, in part with the aim of making the volume less a collection and more a real book.

There are differences of style and emphasis between the earlier and later essays, but they are unified by a consistent reliance on the close reading of sequences to back up the claims made about the filnis, a consistent practice of close reading, and a consistent commitment to reflecting on what that practice reveals about film. Taken together, these essays survey film history from early Griffith almost to the present day. From this survey, a picture of the history of film emerges, at least in outline – a picture that acknowledges the centrality of films that reflect philosophically on the mysterious powers and limits of their medium.

Through extended readings of five characteristic films, Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze attempted to arrive at an understanding of Hitchcock's authorship and its place in the history of film.