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Film Comment (1979) - The Big Hitch

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Abstract

The purpose of this exasperated mugging of Alfred Hitchcock is not to hurt or abuse a senior professional-he seems constitutionally immune from either-but to show that glittering engineering and morbid perfection do not take up all of film's potential or satisfy our hopes as an audience. Surely we require the impurity of human intransigence to temper the awful sublimity of unhindered formalism? I cannot imagine pure cinema, yet I suppose that Leni Riefenstahl's thunder of style obliterating individualism is our most ominous approximation to it.

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