Senses of Cinema (2007) - Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright

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(c) John Orr, Senses of Cinema

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Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright

• by John Orr

This essay is a return to the scene of the crime. In my recent book, Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema, I made an outrageously general argument for the affinity between Alfred Hitchcock’s narratives and David Hume’s reasoning about human nature. For something so speculative, you expect cracks to appear pretty soon. But my impulse since the book’s appearance has not been to feel I exaggerated – which I’m sure I did – but to sense that I did not go far enough. There was more to...

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John Orr is Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, the author of Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 1998), Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2005), and co-editor with Elzbieta Ostrowska of The Cinema of Roman Polanski (Wallflower Press, 2006).

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