In recent years, the enduring appeal of Alfred Hitchcock to film studies has been evidenced by the proliferation of innovative approaches to the director's work. Adding to this pattern of innovation, the edited collection One Shot Hitchcock: A Contemporary Approach to the Screen utilizes formal analysis to interrogate key single shots from across Alfred Hitchcock's long career. This collection reveals the value of analyzing the single shot - within this small, cinematic unit is a code that unlocks a series of revelations about cinema as an artistic practice and a theoretical study. Each chapter examines one shot from a single film, beginning with The Lodger (1927) and ending with Frenzy (1972).
If Hitchcock is known as a director of suspense films and films about murder, the shots discussed in One Shot Hitchcock are his crime scenes. These are the shots that resist being forgotten, that repeatedly demand to be investigated, in which Hitchcock's influence on aesthetics and culture is at its most acute. Each chapter uses a different lens of film analysis - transnationalism, gender and sexuality, performance, history, affect, intermediality, remake studies, philosophy, and film form are all used to interrogate single shots. In these essays, the single shot from Hitchcock's film not only illustrates the approach in question but also demonstrates how the single shot encourages us to rethink our approaches to the screen. By reinvigorating a close formal mode of analysis, One Shot Hitchcock asks readers to think differently about film, offering a renewed assessment of Hitchcock's oeuvre in the process.
In One Shot Hitchcock, some of the best writers and thinkers in film studies have taken up the challenge of writing about a single shot from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Fifteen of Hitchcock's most engaging, horrifying, beautiful, sexual, and bizarre shots are interrogated and loved. Single shots are looked at from multiple angles, considering its importance for the film in question, and for other ways we can think about the cinema. This book is not only for people who enjoy watching and discussing Hitchcock's films, but for those who wish to discover new ways of writing about the films they love.
"Asserting the supremacy of the singular shot in Hitchcock's visual vocabulary, while offering plural takes on a spectrum of his films, One Shot Hitchcock is a prismatic view of film scholarship today. The volume makes room for historians and philosophers, emerging and established voices, proving that writing on Hitchcock remains a gold standard in the field."
