William Rothman argues that the driving force of Hitchcock’s work was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite quotation from Oscar Wilde, “Each man kills the thing he loves,” with the quintessentially American philosophy that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era their extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic seriousness. Calling attention to the surprising affinities between Hitchcock’s way of thinking cinematically and the philosophical way of thinking Emerson’s essays exemplify, Rothman reflects on the implications of this discovery, not only for Hitchcock scholarship but also for film criticism in general.
“Nobody knows the films of Alfred Hitchcock better than William Rothman. The idea of linking these wonderful and dense films with an Emersonian vision is inspired. Rothman's training in philosophy combines lucidly with his lifelong devotion to film in producing a work of originality and authority.”
— Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Harvard University
William Rothman is the author of several books, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1984); Documentary Film Classics (1997); A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000); and The "I" of the Camera (2003). An expanded edition of his landmark study Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze was published in 2012. He is editor of the "Studies in Film" series published by Cambridge University Press.
