Table of Contents

Preface by Constance Penley

A Bit of History

1. The Unattainable Text
2. System of a Fragment (on The Birds)
3. The Obvious and the Code (on The Big Sleep)
4. Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest)
5. To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi)
6. To Enunciate (on Marnie)
7. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho)
8. To Alternate/ to Narrate (on The Lonedale Operator)

Notes
Works by Raymond Bellour
Index

Promotional Information

Bellour's classic studies of Hollywood film.

About the Author

Raymond Bellour is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is a scholar and writer whose work has been devoted to both literature—especially the Brontës, Dumas, and Michaux—and film—most notably L'Analyse du film, first published in 1979, and several related collections including Le Cinéma Américain and Le Western. Since the early eighties his work has concentrated on mixed media and the relation between words and images. This new focus has resulted in an exhibition, Passages de l'image (1989); a book, L'Entre-Images (1990); and a MOMA catalog, Jean-Luc Godard: Sonimage (1992). In 1991, with Serge Daney, he started the film journal Trafic. Constance Penley is Professor and Chair of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A founding editor of the leading feminist media journal, Camera Obscura, she also edited the influential collection Feminism and Film Theory. Penley has written widely in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and science studies. Her most recent books are NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Invisible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, edited with Paula Treichler and Lisa Cartwright.

Reviews

"No serious student of film should miss the great work collected in this volume... the essays in this collection remind the reader what a brilliant film analyst Bellour was... it is for the Hitchcock analyses that this book will be most valued." Choice "When so much writing about film is based on overall impressions or shadowy memories, on notes scribbled in the dark or published shot breakdowns that are often overgeneralized or even inaccurate, it is refreshing to be confronted with such scholarly work, characterized by a genuinely attentive eye and a punctilious observation of detail. This long-awaited collection, gathering Bellour's ground breaking studies into one volume, will surely be a crucial source of inspiration for future generations of film scholars." Peter Wollen, Bookforum