One Shot Hitchcock: Contemporary Approaches to the Screen

H-Film CFP (Closing this week): One Shot Hitchcock: Contemporary Approaches to the Screen

Discussion published by Melanie Robson on Monday, October 12, 2020

Dr Melanie Robson and Mr Luke Robinson are seeking essays for our proposed book:One Shot Hitchcock: Contemporary Approaches to the Screen.

One Shot Hitchcock: Contemporary Approaches to the Screen is an edited collection that interrogates poignant and memorable shots from across Alfred Hitchcock’s long transnational career. Each chapter takes one shot from a single film, beginning with his silent era and ending withFamily Plot (1976). 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, these are the shots that repeatedly demand to be investigated, these are the shots in which Hitchcock’s influence on aesthetics and culture is at its most acute.

Taking Marilyn Fabe’s Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative and Film Technique as a model, each chapter of One Shot Hitchcock exemplifies a contemporary approach to the screen and screen culture. The book is structured in parts, each with a focus on a different ‘lens’ of film analysis: gender and sexuality, race, affect, film and philosophy, and film form are all used to interrogate single shots from Hitchcock’s films. 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 and screen culture.

We are seeking potential contributors to submit a proposal which includes300 a word abstract to [email protected] by the 14th October 2020. Selected contributors will be asked to write a 4000-6000 words essay (including bibliography) on their chosen shot.

We have already received proposals forThe Man Who Knew Too Much(both versions), Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, The Birds and Marnie and we encourage potential contributors to think beyond these films. We welcome proposals from all eras of Hitchcock’s career, but are particularly interested in papers on his British silent and sound era, television (such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and his late 1960s-1970s period.

Based on the abstracts we have already received we particularly welcome papers that take the following approaches to Hitchcock’s work:

Citation: Melanie Robson. CFP (Closing this week): One Shot Hitchcock: Contemporary Approaches to the Screen. H-Film. 10-12-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14467/discussions/6559372/cfp-closing-week-one-shot-hitchcock-contemporary-approaches Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Film

Philosophy Class Technology Race/ethnicity Affect Auteur theory Memory and history Queer theory (Trans)national cinemas/global cinemas

Please submit proposals as a Word document, with title, 300 word abstract, researcher’s full name, title, institutional affiliation (if possible) and short bio (max 100 words). Please save the file as your surname, Hitchcock film, approach.

The abstract should:

Name the Hitchcock film, TV episode, screen text Provide details of the shot (place in narrative, details of cinematography, sound etc) Outline the approach to the screen adopted (with reference to key scholarship, as applicable) Explain how and why this particular shot is relevant for the approach adopted and/or for a critical understanding of Hitchcock's body of work.

We look forward to reading your proposals. If you have any questions about the co-edited collection, please contact Dr Melanie Robson or Mr Luke Robinson at [email protected]

Dr Melanie Robson holds a Ph.D. in film studies. She is an adjunct lecturer at the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW Australia, and a lecturer at AFTRS. She is co-founder and president of the Sydney Screen Studies Network (SSSN). Her research investigates the long take, modernist cinema, horror television, and evolutions of film style across contemporary European and American film. She has been published in Studies in European Cinema and Mise-en-Scene.

Mr Luke Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate and sessional lecturer at the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW. He is also the treasurer of the Sydney Screen Studies Network (SSSN) and a video artist working with Move in Pictures. Luke’s research interests are classical Hollywood film, issues and theories and politics of visibility and invisibility, aesthetics and politics of fascism and film, approaches to film materiality, and theories of film sound.