In a dazzling close reading of the film, Diane Negra peels off this Rockwellian veneer layer by layer. She demonstrates how close reading, archival research and wide-ranging scholarly sources contribute to surprising feminist interpretations of a film that still resonates.” – Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota “Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with its idealized portrayal of the American family and rosy depiction of small-town USA, can be easily mistaken for the British filmmaker’s paean to his adoptive country. Negra’s book, like a reel of film unspooling on the projection room floor, unravels how Hitchcock’s obsessions with symmetry and pairing leave the viewer, and in this case, the reader at once informed and anxious. Lurking amid the oblique and obvious references to Freud, fascism and foreigners, she finds in Shadow of a Doubt a claustrophobic return to America’s foundational fiction-that it remains an innocent city on a hill, rather than the blood-stained remnant of war and plunder. She demonstrates how close reading, archival research and wide-ranging scholarly sources contribute to surprising feminist interpretations of a film that still resonates.” – Paula Rabinowitz, University of MinnesotaĪdvance praise for Shadow of a Doubt “Diane Negra’s nifty gem of a book is jam-packed with insights into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated (yet among his favorite) movies. “Diane Negra’s nifty gem of a book is jam-packed with insights into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated (yet among his favorite) movies. ISBN: 978-1-9 Cover photograph: © Universal Pictures She serves as Co-Editor-inChief of Television and New Media and as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission. She is the author, editor or co-editor of twelve books, including Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001), The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016) and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I:’ Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021). In the process, she makes a compelling case for moving Shadow of a Doubt closer to the heart of the Hitchcock canon.” – Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University “Negra persuasively shows how Uncle Charlie’s symptomatic monstrosity and Young Charlie’s complex victimization are intimately related to institutionalized patriarchy and misogyny, stifling family structures, and a culture of smiling evasiveness in the world that they live in: one that is recognizably America in the early 1940s – and beyond.” – Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. “In a dazzling close reading of the film, Diane Negra peels off Rockwellian veneer layer by layer. This book understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life. Analysing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and ‘family values’, she shows how the film’s impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film’s terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. In this path-breaking book, Diane Negra redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. The project was featured on the Filmmagasinet Ekko and Télérama web sites.Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s sixth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. The aim of the project is to create a library of images which can be used to illustrate blog posts, web articles and reviews, etc.įurther details are available on Dave's weblog and Flickr photostream. "1000 Frames of Hitchcock" is an attempt to reduce each of the 52 available major Hitchcock films down to just 1000 frames.
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