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Hitchcock's Modernism

Hitchcock's Modernism David Trotter Alfred Hitchcock has been mentioned with increasing frequency in modernist despatches. For the most part, this interest has taken the form of the elaboration of intellectual and cultural contexts for a particular film. The Lodger (1926), for example, has quite often been described as the one British film of the period to absorb fully the consequences of experiment in cinema in France and Germany, of which Hitchcock was certainly aware by that time, and even in Russia, of which he may well not have been aware. Much has been made of the part played by the London Film Society, and by one of its members in particular, Ivor Montagu, who was brought in to help complete the film, in spreading the word about German and possibly Russian cinema. ‘The London Film Society’s most significant outcome’, Peter Wollen has written, ‘was its impact on Alfred Hitchcock, a habitual and doubtless punctual attender at screenings. There Hitchcock not only mingled with the cultural elite but also absorbed modernist aesthetic ideas, which he later attempted to nurture within narrative film’.1 A second line of enquiry concerns Hitchcock’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) as Sabotage (1936). Much http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modernist Cultures Edinburgh University Press

Hitchcock's Modernism

Trotter, David
Modernist Cultures , Volume 5 (1): 106 – May 1, 2010
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press 2010
Subject
Articles; Film, Media and Cultural Studies
ISSN
2041-1022
eISSN
1753-8629
DOI
10.3366/mod.2010.0008
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

David Trotter Alfred Hitchcock has been mentioned with increasing frequency in modernist despatches. For the most part, this interest has taken the form of the elaboration of intellectual and cultural contexts for a particular film. The Lodger (1926), for example, has quite often been described as the one British film of the period to absorb fully the consequences of experiment in cinema in France and Germany, of which Hitchcock was certainly aware by that time, and even in Russia, of which he may well not have been aware. Much has been made of the part played by the London Film Society, and by one of its members in particular, Ivor Montagu, who was brought in to help complete the film, in spreading the word about German and possibly Russian cinema. ‘The London Film Society’s most significant outcome’, Peter Wollen has written, ‘was its impact on Alfred Hitchcock, a habitual and doubtless punctual attender at screenings. There Hitchcock not only mingled with the cultural elite but also absorbed modernist aesthetic ideas, which he later attempted to nurture within narrative film’.1 A second line of enquiry concerns Hitchcock’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) as Sabotage (1936). Much

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Modernist Cultures – Edinburgh University Press

Published: May 1, 2010

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