St Mary’s Research Fellow Publishes New Book on Hitchcock

Professorial Research Fellow Charles Barr, an acknowledged expert on Alfred Hitchcock based at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, is to publish a new book that offers a completely new angle on the career of the renowned director. Hitchcock, Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films, co-authored by the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf, will be published in March by the University of Kentucky Press. The book systematically investigates neglected areas of Hitchcock’s career, focusing in particular on the early 1920s (the apprentice years before he directed his first feature), the early 1930s (an uncertain period during the adjustment to sound), and the early 1940s, when he worked on a series of war-effort short films in the margin of his Hollywood features. It examines a mixture of newly-found films, long-neglected films, and new data about films that remain lost. The result is a fuller understanding of the nature of Hitchcock’s authorship, and of the variety of influences and collaborators that helped to create his body of work and his very distinctive status within film history. Professor Barr is already author of English Hitchcock (1999) and of a study of one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films Vertigo (BFI Classics series: new edition 2012). An Emeritus Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Foundation in 2012 enabled him to spend six weeks in America, using archives on both East and West coasts to supplement the extensive research done by both authors in Europe. The combination of French and British authors and American publisher is peculiarly appropriate, since Hitchcock’s career was divided between Britain and Hollywood, and French critics were the first to celebrate him as a master. Hitchcock, Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films will be seen as an important intervention in Hitchcock Studies, and in the wider field of Film Studies.