| Movies invite us to contemplate images that move over time. But what is the effect on the image of such concentrated scrutiny? Surface yields to uncertainty, and uncertainty to the mystery of story. In his late masterpieces “Psycho” and “Marnie,” Alfred Hitchcock sought to create the effect of a pure cinema, in which the film image would be freed from the constraints of conventional narrative to deliver to a mass audience the emotional force of an archetypal experience. This lecture will focus on the filmmaker’s interrogation of the image, as he coaxes it to unfold its mythic secret. |