Watching Cosmic Time: The Suspense Films of Hitchcock, Welles, and Reed
Ebook
How do the suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Carol Reed allow us special insight into the popular mentality of their contemporaries--contemporaries who went to war against the forces of Adolf Hitler? How did midcentury films that fetishized clocks and time-keeping devices as diverse as Peter Pan, High Noon, Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, The Stranger, and Odd Man Out produce unique experiences that invited audiences to literally watch cosmic time? What role did cinema audiences play in perpetuating the presumption that order exists in the universe--and how have the polyvalent institutions of church and state implicated human agency in such perpetuation? This full-length academic treatment of the topic employs formal film analysis that is situated squarely within historical studies and addresses these cinematic and phenomenological questions--and more.
“Moore convincingly argues that cinema in the forties and
fifties perpetuated the presumption that the universe is
fundamentally orderly. He focuses engagingly on suspense films that
incorporate clocks in a way that allows the audience to literally
watch time as an emblem of an orderly universe. Moore’s overall
purpose, though, is to encourage us to reflect on the role time
plays in how we access, interpret, and respond to what we
experience.”
—David Basinger, Roberts Wesleyan College
“This insightful study of postwar cinema considers how visual and
audio elements in suspense films attended to the passing of time.
Watching time was emblematic of order under stress from war and its
aftermath. Thoroughly attentive to the details of his cinematic
texts, Matthew Moore convincingly argues that filmic worldviews and
geopolitical events intersected as suspense films explored moral
decision-making and the paradoxes of power. Highly
recommended.”
—Stanley C. Pelkey, University of Kentucky School of Music
“Moore’s exploration of key mid-twentieth-century films against the
backdrop of World War II and the problem of order versus chaos is a
tour de force of insightful analysis. His attentiveness to clocks
and time references in these films made me want to go back and
watch them again. Moore’s thick description of the geopolitical
backdrop of the movies draws the reader in to reflect on how the
anxieties of the mid-twentieth century are still with us
today.”
—J. Richard Middleton, Northeastern Seminary, Roberts Wesleyan
College
“This book’s greatest strength is Moore’s attention to the
humanities writ large as he deftly interweaves disciplines ranging
from the geopolitics of modern European history to theology and
religious allegory as underpinnings for his discussion of these
films’ presentations of cosmic and metachronic time. This strategy
provides both rich context and a compelling vision for how these
works from cinema history correlate to the frisson of the
contemporary film-viewing experience—from making meaning to the
power of personal agency.”
—Karen (Ren) vanMeenen, editor, Afterimage
- Title: Watching Cosmic Time: The Suspense Films of Hitchcock, Welles, and Reed
- Author: Matthew Dwight Moore
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666726541, 9781666732627, 9781666726534, 1666726540, 1666732621, 1666726532
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666726541
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-19T10:57:57Z
Matthew Dwight Moore is associate professor of humanities at the
Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York and recipient of a
2020 National Endowment for the Humanities grant. He has written in
Silence and the Silenced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(2013), Earnest: Interdisciplinary Work Inspired by the Life and
Teachings of B.T. Roberts (2017), and Afterimage: The
Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (2016–17). His
poetry has been published in High Shelf Press and
Prometheus Dreaming.