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A Discussion with Prof. James Conant Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago

 for a talk on Cinematic Genre and Viewer Engagement in Hitchcock's Psycho

Attendees are encouraged to watch Psycho prior to attending the talk. We were unable to schedule a screening this time around, but the film is currently streaming on Netflix! 

Alfred Hitchcock’s admirers are fond of praising his work for being cinematically innovative. The article included, upon which this evening's talk is based, seeks to determine wherein his achievement in this regard lies. It begins by reflecting on the ways in which his movies harbor a form of “false bottom”—one that characterizes the new form of cinematic genre that Hitchcock pioneers. It then examines some of the particular ways in which this allows for novel kinds of viewer engagement. It does so, in particular, by attending to the forms of cinematic invisibility and disclosure enabled by the shower scene in Psycho. That this scene is somehow remarkable is hardly news. Yet in priding ourselves on being struck by its cinematic virtuosity, we are apt to fail to appreciate how that impression deflects our attention from the scene’s real achievement— namely, the extent to which it enables the following five maneuvers all to be performed simultaneously in a manner permitting none of them to strike us on a first viewing: (1) the mediation of a transition from one organizing center of narrative subjectivity to another; (2) the dilation of the temporality of the scene in a manner that facilitates a registration of its significance; (3) a mode of aestheticization of the horror of the scene that opens up space for a very different form of experience of cinematic shock; (4) the artful concealment of the murderer’s identity requisite to the unfolding of its plot; and (5) the consolidation of a “false bottom” in the movie’s generic structure found throughout Hitchcock’s masterworks.

James Conant is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, as well as Humboldt Professor at the University of Leipzig. He works broadly in philosophy and has published articles in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, German Idealism, and History of Analytic Philosophy, among other areas, and on a wide range of philosophers, including Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Josiah Royce, William James, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, and McDowell, among others. He is currently working on four book-length projects: a monograph on skepticism entitled Varieties of Skepticism, a co-authored collection of essays with Cora Diamond entitled Wittgenstein and the Inheritance of Philosophy, a book on film aesthetics entitled The Ontology of the Cinematographic Image, and a forthcoming collection of interpretative essays on a variety of philosophers entitled Resolute Readings.