One Shot Hitchcock : A Contemporary Approach to the Screen

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.