Updated January 20, 2014
A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.
Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute
FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.
The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.
FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.
- Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
- The Gothic Imagination website, University of Stirling
- BFI Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film Resources
- BFI Gothic in the Classroom Resources
- Elizabeth Abele, 'The Glory of Cary Grant and Other Girlish Delights. 3: Suspicious Looks', Images, Issue 5, 1997
- Glennis Byron, '©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight', The Gothic Imagination, December 31, 2010
- David Cairns, 'Felicitous Rooms: Fritz Lang’s House by the River', Senses of Cinema, October 2005
- Fergus Cook, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre Documents, date unknown
- Amanda Leigh Davis, 'Gothically Postmodern: Film Noir-Gothic Hybrids and the 1980s', Velox: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Film, Vol 2, No 1 (2008)
- R D’Mont, 'Changing form: Stage, film and TV adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca', In: Carroll, R., ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum, pp. 163-173
- 'Du Maurier + Selznick + Hitchcock = Rebecca', The ASC, July 1997
- Coralline Dupuy, '"Why don't you remember? Are you crazy?": Korean Gothic and psychosis in A Tale of Two Sisters', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
- Added Thomas Elsaesser, Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous', Screening the Past, 18, 2001
- Winfried Fluck, 'Mass Culture Modernism: Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir', Romance with America (Heidelburg, 2009)
- Catherine Grant, 'Rites of Passage [on Joan Fontaine in Rebecca]', Vimeo, December 2013
- David Greven, 'Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s', Jump Cut, 55, Fall 2013
- Eoghain Hamilton (ed), The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)
- Jenni Heeks, Teaching Resources on The Innocents for a BFI Workshop, Autumn, 2013
- Steven Jacobs, excerpt on Rebecca from The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (101 Publishers, 2007)
- Stuart M Joy, 'The Patriarchal Reception of Hysteria: Understanding thePossessed Woman in the Paranormal Activity franchise', Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity, 3.1, 2013
- Frank Lafond, 'With them, I'm howling: Guillaume Radot's Le Loup des Malveneur (The Wolf of the Malveneurs, 1942)', Kinoeye, 1, 2005
- Mark Jancovich, 'Bluebeard’s Wives: Horror, Quality and the Paranoid Woman’s Film in the 1940s', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 12 (Summer 2013)
- Mark Jancovich, 'Shadows and Bogeymen: Horror, Stylization and the Critical Reception of Orson Welles during the 1940s', Participations, 6.1, May 2009
- Mark Jancovich, 'Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman's Film', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
- Bill Krohn et al, 'The Original Ending Shot for Suspicion', The MacGuffin, 2007
- Samatha Jane Lindop, 'The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me', M/C Journal, 15.1, 2012
- Adrian Martin, 'Lady, Beware: Female Gothic Variations', Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 2005
- Gary McCarron, 'Moralizing Uncertainty: Suspicion and Faith in Hitchcock's Suspicion', Canadian Journal of Communication, 27.1, 2002
- Ken Mogg, 'The Day of the Claw: A Synoptic Account of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
- Eithne O'Neill, 'Kazan's Streetcar: Film Noir, Woman's Film or Noir Woman's Film?', Cercles, 10 (2004)
- John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
- Phillip Novak, 'Performing Politics (Review)', PMC, 19.2, 2009
- Esther Pereen, 'Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor', The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014)
- Ana Salzberg, Beyond the looking glass: the narcissistic woman reflected and embodied in classic Hollywood film, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010
- Aaron Smuts, ' Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002
- Monica Cristina Soare, 'Chapter 5: The Final Girl as Female Quixote', The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction, PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 2013
- Jack Sullivan, excerpt on 'Franz Waxman and Suspicion', from Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
- Elizabeth Tucker, '[Review] Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, By Maria Tatar, 2006', Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2007
- Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
- Patricia White/Annamarie Jagose, 'Interview', Genders, 32, 2000
- Tony Williams, 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, 2006
- Dagmara Zając, 'Gothic Cinema: Horror on Screen and the Perils of (Over)Interpretation', The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, ed. by Eoghain Hamilton (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)
