A Dream of Hitchcock

<p><b>Explores the director's repeated voyages into the dreamlike.</b></p><p><i>A Dream of Hitchcock</i> examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock's work-dreamscapes dream processes the dream effect-by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: <i>Strangers on a Train</i> <i>Rebecca</i> <i>Saboteur</i> <i>Rear Window</i> <i>To Catch a Thief</i> and <i>Family Plot</i>. The Hitchcockian dream as invoked here is not so much a dream as it is a way of understanding in its dramatic contexts an unearthly irrational quality in the filmmaker's work. <i>Rebecca</i> revolves around problems of memory; <i>To Catch a Thief</i> around uncertainty; <i>Saboteur</i> around pungent aspiration; <i>Family Plot</i> around intuition; <i>Rear Window</i> around expansive imagination; and <i>Strangers on a Train</i> around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance's distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock's work allows these films to inform theorization not the other way around. His original provocative and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy improbability doubt disconcertion hope memory intuition and belief through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life.</p>