Introduction

What did Alfred Hitchcock mean by the concept, pure cinema? The question is worth asking not only because Hitchcock frequently spoke about pure cinema, but also because his many references to the idea of cinematic purity were anything but consistent. Equivocation can be charming at times, of course, but it can also be confusing. That Hitchcock was equivocal as to how he framed his conception of pure cinema may be a bit of both, but however one regards his tendency for semantic slippage his lack of precision has not passed unnoticed among Hitchcock scholars. For instance, Thomas Leitch says that Hitchcock seems to have understood pure cinema in three different ways: as an aesthetic concern based on the principle of montage, as a technical matter rooted in a particular style of editing, and as an empirical issue best understood in relation to audience response. This list guides my analysis in this chapter, though I include a fourth item I refer to as the primacy of the visual. Of course, these categories are not completely isolated from one another as we will see shortly. Furthermore, my claim that Hitchcock was inconsistent is neither a slight nor an accusation. In fact, it may turn out that the differ¬ent ways in which he developed his notions of cinematic purity are joined at deeper epistemological levels despite their surface differences.

The fact that Hitchcock offered different answers when questioned about his theory of pure cinema has prompted some critics to regard the concept with suspicion. For instance, the variation that is evident in Leitch's three formulations prompts him to conclude that Hitchcock's understanding of pure cinema was “dated, self-aggrandizing, and inconsistent.” Yet even as he acknowledges the slipperiness of pure cinema, Leitch concludes that the importance of the concept for “both Hitchcock and cinema in general can hardly be overstated.