Long Hard Look at Psycho

Raymond Durgnat's classic study of Hitchcock's Psycho provides a minute analysis of this remarkable film, considering how it enables us to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psychoanalysis, editing and shot composition. This new edition includes an original introduction by Henry K. Miller.

In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early 1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho became one of its first objects.

Introduction to the 2010 Edition by Henry K. Miller
Introduction to the 2002 Edition
Developing the Film
A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho'
Matters Arising
Notes
Credits
Bibliography