Why I wasn't interested in Hitchcock films until I turned 40: viewing films as entertainment

McKee, A

Why I wasn't interested in Hitchcock films until I turned 40: viewing films as entertainment

McKee, A

Permalink

Publisher:: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication Type:: Chapter
Citation:: Entertainment Values How do we Assess Entertainment and Why does it Matter?, 2017, pp. 213 - 225
Issue Date:: 2017-08-23

Open Access

Copyright Clearance Process

Recently Added
In Progress
Open Access

This item is open access.

Microsoft Word XML

Download Accepted Manuscript versionMicrosoft Word XML (60.64 kB)

View statistics

Full metadata record

Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	McKee, A https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0577-2061	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Harrington, S	en_US
dc.date.available	2020-09-01T19:02:30Z
dc.date.issued	2017-08-23	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Entertainment Values How do we Assess Entertainment and Why does it Matter?, 2017, pp. 213 - 225	en_US
dc.identifier.isbn	1137472898	en_US
dc.identifier.isbn	9781137472892	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/119261
dc.description.abstract	This book is concerned with how we decide what is good entertainment. In this chapter I offer an answer to that question in aesthetic terms. The academic discipline of Film Studies has a developed over many decades a series of methods for studying films as art. But entertainment and art are different cultural forms with different aesthetic systems (McKee, 2012). As academics we know how to judge a film’s success or failure as a work of art: but how would we judge a film’s success or failure – its value - as a piece of entertainment? This question holds a particular place in my heart, and the example of Alfred Hitchcock helps to explain why. I somehow managed to miss Hitchcock’s films growing up. Born in 1970 I was too late to see his films in the cinema. I’m not sure how I managed to miss them on the television, but my first significant exposure to his work came when I went to the University of Glasgow to study Film and Television. In the course of these studies I was introduced to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the artist. John Caughie was one of my lecturers, and we studied his germinal reader Theories of Authorship (Caughie, 1981b). This provided my introduction to the cinema d’auteurs and its theory of the value of cinema: Auteurism shares certain basic assumptions: notably, that a film, although produced collectively, is most likely to be valuable when the director dominates the proceedings; that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an artist, a film is more than likely to be the expression of his [sic] individual personality; and that this personality can be traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or almost all) the director’s films (Caughie, 1981a, p. 9)	en_US
dc.publisher	Palgrave Macmillan	en_US
dc.relation.ispartof	Entertainment Values How do we Assess Entertainment and Why does it Matter?	en_US
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.title	Why I wasn't interested in Hitchcock films until I turned 40: viewing films as entertainment	en_US
dc.type	Chapter
utslib.location	London	en_US
utslib.for	1902 Film, Television and Digital Media	en_US
pubs.embargo.period	Not known	en_US
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences/FASS Faculty Administration
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*
pubs.consider-herdc	true	en_US
pubs.place-of-publication	London	en_US
pubs.publication-status	Published	en_US

Abstract:

This book is concerned with how we decide what is good entertainment. In this chapter I offer an answer to that question in aesthetic terms. The academic discipline of Film Studies has a developed over many decades a series of methods for studying films as art. But entertainment and art are different cultural forms with different aesthetic systems (McKee, 2012). As academics we know how to judge a film’s success or failure as a work of art: but how would we judge a film’s success or failure – its value - as a piece of entertainment? This question holds a particular place in my heart, and the example of Alfred Hitchcock helps to explain why. I somehow managed to miss Hitchcock’s films growing up. Born in 1970 I was too late to see his films in the cinema. I’m not sure how I managed to miss them on the television, but my first significant exposure to his work came when I went to the University of Glasgow to study Film and Television. In the course of these studies I was introduced to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the artist. John Caughie was one of my lecturers, and we studied his germinal reader Theories of Authorship (Caughie, 1981b). This provided my introduction to the cinema d’auteurs and its theory of the value of cinema: Auteurism shares certain basic assumptions: notably, that a film, although produced collectively, is most likely to be valuable when the director dominates the proceedings; that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an artist, a film is more than likely to be the expression of his [sic] individual personality; and that this personality can be traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or almost all) the director’s films (Caughie, 1981a, p. 9)

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:

http://hdl.handle.net/10453/119261