Hitchcock and the Anxiety of Authorship examines issues of cinema authorship engaged by and dynamized within the director's films. A unique study of self-reflexivity in Hitchcock's work from his earliest English silents to his final Hollywood features, this book considers how the director's releases constitute ever-shifting meditations on the conditions and struggles of creative agency in cinema. Abramson explores how, located in literal and emblematic sites of dramatic production, exhibition, and reception, and populated by figures of directors, actors, and audiences, Hitchcock's films exhibit a complicated, often disturbing vision of authorship - one that consistently problematizes rather than exemplifies the director's longstanding auteurist image. Viewing Hitchcock in a striking new light, Abramson analyzes these allegories of vexed agency in the context of his concepts of and commentary on the troubled association between cinema artistry and authorship, as well as the changing cultural, industrial, theoretical, and historical milieus in which his features were produced. Accordingly, the book illuminates how Hitchcock and his cinema register the constant dynamics that constitute film authorship.

This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s, the most stirring early work was likely Mary Poppins. This 1964 film captivated young audiences, earning top-grossing ticket sales, multiple Oscars, and landmark status as a cultural phenomenon. The book illuminates Mary Poppins as a musical teeming with preoccupations of American youth in the early-to-mid-1960s, including antiestablishment desires, anxieties, and pleasures. Reading against the dominant grain, this book deciphers Mary Poppins as a mid-century reflection that spans the generation gap, dysfunctional nuclear family, youth unrest, activism including feminist advocacy, counterculturalism, capitalist imperialism, race relations, socially conscious music, and hallucinogenic consciousness expansion. Conjunctively, the book explores tensions inherent in this studio production as a mainstream Disney release evoking imperatives of 1960s American youth while sanitizing figures and values representing radical change. Further, examining the film's collective authorship, this volume traces Mary Poppins' origins in the writings and life of nonconformist author P.L. Travers as well as in Disney cinema and the studio's adaptation processes. Analysis extends to diverse facets of Mary Poppins' reception, including the shifting image of its star, Julie Andrews, the film's influence on popular culture and controversy among some as an adaptation, its appropriation by drug culture, association with the teenpic, and status as cinema of social consciousness. This book is ideal for students, researchers, and scholars of cinema studies and youth culture.