Gratitude to my friend Prof. TW who emailed me in sympathetic vein to
say that he agrees with me about Irving Singer's 'Three Philosophical
Filmmakers' - parts of which appear to be 'the result of Harvard and MIT
Senior Common Room comments by people who've discovered [Hitchcock's]
significance for the first time and appear oblivious that the same
things have been said before'! (I hasten to add that Singer's book -
which I'm still currently reading - is always fluent and has some useful
passages, such as one likening Hitchcock's essentially non-realist
filmmaking [the films' realism is just laid on, albeit with painstaking
care, for rhetorical reasons] to the understanding of I.A. Richards
about how a poem works from within, from the inside out.)
I further thank TW for reminding me again in a recent email of the 1904
novel by Jack London, 'The Sea Wolf', which was inspired by London's
reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. (The most successful film
version of the novel was of course Michael Curtiz's, made in 1941 and
starring Edward G. Robinson as the
ruthless and wilfully insular sea captain who is finally defeated. In
that description I see
Schopenhauerian links to such Hitchcock films as LIFEBOAT, VERTIGO, and
THE BIRDS.)
TW adds: 'I believe the novel can be read against this [Schopenhauerian
and Nietzschean] background as you have done with Hitchcock.'
- Ken Mogg (Ed., 'The MacGuffin').
Website: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin
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