Throughout his long career, Alfred Hitchcock made a number of claims about the art of “pure cinema.” These claims were usually anchored in some notion of visual form, or what Hitchcock commonly referred to as the “visual idea.” This lecture attempts to subject the art of Hitchcockian sound design and production to a pure film analysis, extending the notion of pure cinema to that most neglected element of film form, sound.
Bruce Isaacs is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on the intersection of aesthetic forms and theories across cinema, literature and post-cinematic new media texts. He is the author of The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Orientation of Future Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013), and has written articles and chapters on cinema as a function of technological and textual convergence.
The Screen Cultures public lecture series aims to generate conversations about how screens — of all types — shape our understanding of, and interactions with, the world. Internationally recognized experts deliver the lectures. Like screens themselves, the Screen Cultures public lecture series is for everyone.