Blackwell Reference Online

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As we have seen, screen studies is a contested area, with a plurality of methods vying for authority. And it is sometimes ignorant, because when these methods are not debating each other, they rarely converse. Here, I look at ways of reading two films, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession ( Nicolas Roeg, 1980) , to showcase different interpretative methods drawn from the humanities and social sciences and identify such potential conversations (the References section of this chapter lists some of the critical writing on these texts). Psycho is canonical in both film theory and production, not to mention popular appreciation of Hitchcock and the horror genre. Bad Timing is peripheral by comparison. Nevertheless, it has inspired a wide range of interpretative protocols, which are “fresher” in film theory than those applied to Psycho ; and it won the top award at the 1980 Toronto Film Festival. Whereas Hitchcock has come to be seen as the voyeur par excellence , whose spying gaze peeps in on people, Roeg has been described as “Hitchcock with the ice melted … an eye in overdrive” ( Penman 1998 : 85). In each case, it becomes clear that a discourse about a film produced by a critic can transform the meaning of the object it supposedly seeks to explicate. One critical discourse may make the text incommensurate with that generated by another, ... log in or subscribe to read full text