Jump to: navigation, search

Journal of Architectural Education (2009) - The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock

Details

Links

Article

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock

To say that Alfred Hitchcock designed his sets to tell and not just support stories is an understatement. After beginning his career as a set designer, this famous thriller auteur redefined the idea of filmic space. In his best-known one-set films (Rope, Rear Window, Dial ‘M’ for Murder), spaces are locked and unlocked, sometimes by hidden keys, sometimes by glances and gestures. Even in other films, much of the story takes place within single buildings that trap or challenge the subject. In Rebecca, the young second Mrs. De Winter finds herself in what Jacques Lacan would call a “treasury of signifiers”; the house becomes the tomb or, worse, the fragmented corpse of the not-totally-dead first wife. Similarly, the mission tower in Vertigo, the modernist Vandamm house in North by Northwest, the urban courtyard in Rear Window, and other architectural constructs are not simply backdrops for drama. They are the body for the soul, a filmic imagination that moves beyond the story’s diagesis to speak directly to audience anxiety.

For The Wrong House, Steven Jacobs, an art historian and professor of film history and theory in Europe, carefully scoured such sources as the Hitchcock Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and the British Film Institute in London to create a book that is both a theoretical overview and a detailed account of Hitchcock as an architect. The result is a handbook that compiles r...

[ to view the rest of the article, please try one of the links above ]
Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Journal_of_Architectural_Education_(2009)_-_The_Wrong_House:_The_Architecture_of_Alfred_Hitchcock&oldid=134804’