The Film
Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)
Sisters marked a major turning point in the career of Brian De Palma. Prior to Sisters, De Palma had directed five independent films that were highly irreverent and heavily satirical. However, with Sisters the director of Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom! (1970) turned his attention towards the Hitchcockian thriller, and in his subsequent career De Palma has come to be associated with psychological thrillers, such as Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1982), that frequently foreground their themes of gender conflict and flaunt their Hitchcockian narrative elements. Sisters marked the beginning of De Palma’s development into a highly controversial auteur whose work is hugely divisive: his thrillers have often been derided as misogynistic and/or as simply too derivative of Hitchcock’s work. In an essay entitled ‘How to Steal from Hitchcock’ (2010), Thomas Leitch suggests that ‘[n]o filmmaker has ever produced a more extended meditation on the work of another filmmaker than Brian De Palma. Nor has any filmmaker taken more critical drubbings than De Palma for his borrowings from Hitchcock’ (251). De Palma has, in Leitch’s words, ‘been variously characterized as a Hitchcock imitator, a creator of Hitchcock homages, an acolyte, an heir apparent, a parasite, a scavenger, and a thief’ (ibid.). For example, Sisters fuses elements of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), whilst De Palma’s Obsession (1976) offers an overt homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Both films also featured scores by Bernard Herrmann which recall Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock.
Sisters opens with Phillip Woode (Lisle Wilson), a 25 year old African American man, in a changing room. A blind woman enters. Woode watches as she begins to undress. In a Brechtian moment, the scene is revealed to be part of a Candid Camera-style television programme called ‘Peeping Toms’, in which unknowning members of the public (in this case, Woode) are placed in socially uncomfortable situations, and the contestants have to guess how the unwitting victim will respond to the scenario that is playing out in front of them.
After the programme has ended, Woode is introduced to Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder), the French Canadian model/actress who played the blind woman. The pair hit it off immediately, and they decide to accompany one another to dinner. However, at the restaurant the couple encounter Danielle’s ex-husband, Dr Emil Breton (William Finley), who comes across as overly protective of his ex-wife. Danielle invites Woode back to her apartment in Staten Island. The pair sleep together, but in the morning Danielle advises Woode to be careful not only of her jealous ex-husband, who Woode spotted outside the apartment during the previous night, but also of her twin sister Dominique who ‘gets so crazy when I’m with anyone except her’. Danielle also reveals that it is her (and Dominique’s) birthday.
Danielle sends Woode to a drug store to pick up some medication for her, and when Woode returns to the apartment he is stabbed to death by Dominique. He manages to crawl to a window, where he is spotted by a neighbour, Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a local newspaper reporter. As Collier attempts to persuade the police that a crime has been committed, Dr Breton arrives at Danielle’s apartment and conceals Woode’s body in a fold-out sofa-bed. Finding the police unresponsive to her claims that she saw a murder, partially owing to the anti-authoritarian stance of her newspaper articles, Collier vows to prove that a crime has been committed (‘I saw a murder, and I’ll prove it’, she asserts dramatically to the detective who has been dispatched to the scene). To aid her, Collier hires a private detective, Joseph Larch (Charles Durning). Managing to gain entry into Danielle’s apartment, Larch discovers the body of Woode hidden within the sofa. However, he is interrupted in his search of the apartment by Breton, who has hired a company to ship the sofa out of the country. Larch follows the van containing the sofa, promising to telephone Collier when he discovers where it is going and who is intended to collect it.
Meanwhile, Collier visits Arthur McLennen (Bannard Hughes), a journalist for Life magazine who wrote an article about Danielle and Dominique, Siamese twins who were separated by surgery. McLennen shows Collier a short documentary film about the pair that provides an overview of the history of Siamese twins before showing Danielle and Dominique as children: both of their parents died, and the two girls grew up in the Loisel Institute, where their father had been a doctor, and where Emil Breton also works. Thinking this is a lead worth investigating, Collier visits the Loisel Institute but is captured by Breton, who claims that she is a deluded inmate named Margaret Grisham. Breton drugs and hypnotises Collier, who, guided by Breton’s voice, undergoes a nightmarish hallucination in which she positions herself as Dominique during the twins’ time in the Loisel Institute, up to the point at which, owing to Breton’s sexual desire for Danielle, the twins were separated.
Released less than a year after Frenzy (1973), Hitchcock’s most explicit film and the picture which represented an escalation of ‘master of suspense’s focus on visceral thrills (although the content falls short of that suggested in the script for ‘Kaleidoscope Frenzy’, the undeveloped project that evolved into Frenzy), De Palma’s Sisters upped the ante in terms of sexual and violent content. Whilst it is undeniable that De Palma’s thrillers owe a narrative debt to Hitchcock’s films, De Palma’s aesthetic is more visceral and often more experimental - especially in terms of De Palma’s recurring use of split diopter lenses and split-screen effects, the latter of which features heavily in Sisters. In one bravura sequence, De Palma uses split-screen to show Dr Breton covering up the murder of Woode, hiding the body in Danielle’s sofa, whilst at the same time we witness the police stalling in their ascent to Danielle’s apartment. Furthermore, in comparison with Hitchcock, De Palma emphasises the moments of violence within his films. Where the pivotal murder scene in Psycho (on which Sisters’ narrative is heavily based – both in terms of the theme of a personality that has been internalised by the murderer, and in the killing off of a character who initially seems to be the protagonist) famously only suggested the killer’s knife piercing the flesh of the victim, the first murder in Sisters is far more gruesome. In many ways, the work of De Palma may be compared with the films of the British exploitation filmmaker Pete Walker: both De Palma and Walker (in films such as Schizo, 1976, and Die Screaming, Marianne, 1971) offer a pastiche of Hitchcock that emphasises the violence and sexual content that is only hinted at within Hitchcock’s work, and both De Palma and Walker’s films evidence a worldview that is arguably deeply conservative.
Nevertheless, as Joe McElhaney has noted, De Palma’s films’ ‘concern with technology and large social methods of seeing and constructing images’ means that De Palma’s pictures ‘owe as much to [Fritz] Lang as they do Hitchcock’ (2006: 204). The use of mixed media (the opening footage from the television show ‘Peeping Toms’, the 16mm monochrome documentary about the Loisel Institute) highlights De Palma’s interest in these Fritz Lang-type themes. Owing a significant debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Sisters foregrounds its theme of voyeurism and ‘the social methods of seeing and constructing images’ in its opening and closing sequences. The film opens with Phillip Woode, who is faced with a dilemma when Danielle, an apparently blind young woman, enters the changing room in which Woode is getting dressed: Woode can either alert Danielle to his presence, or watch her unobserved as she gets undressed. As we watch Woode reveling in his apparent control of the gaze, with a Brechtian flourish that is typical of his work De Palma destablises our interpretation of the scene by revealing that it is playing out in front of a studio audience for a television show entitled ‘Peeping Toms’. The studio guests are invited to guess what Woode will do. Woode is apparently unaware that he is being recorded and his response to the dilemma presented to him is being broadcast for the amusement of the television show’s audience. We thus watch the television audience as they watch Woode. Here, and elsewhere in the film, De Palma playfully confronts the politics of the gaze, continuously destabilising our perception of what is taking place onscreen. Later on, for example, when Woode finds himself in Danielle’s Staten Island apartment, he watches a drunken Danielle as she begins to address. As with the opening sequence, Woode is confident in his mastery of the gaze. However, again, De Palma destabilises our comprehension of who is being watched in this sequence, cutting to a shot taken from outside the apartment, watching Woode voyeuristically through the window, which functions as a metaphor for the cinema screen and reminds us that we are watching a carefully-crafted dramatic spectacle.
The 16mm monochrome documentary about Danielle and Dominique’s life in the Loisel Institute – which, filmed in a style similar to the Direct Cinema documentaries of the 1960s, resembles Frederick Wiseman’s controversial Titicut Follies (1967) – also offers an approach to visual representation that destabilises our perception of cinema: the cuts from colour 35mm film to monochrome 16mm film are jarring, and as with ‘Peeping Toms’ we watch portions of this documentary on a television monitor which acts as a frame within the frame. In the documentary, Dr Pierre Milius (John Milius) asserts that, ‘It seems that the older they [Danielle and Dominique] become, the more precarious is their psychological balance, both within themselves and between one another. In this, I am in agreement with my colleagues. Although they tend to think that Dominique is the truly disturbed one, I think that they will find that Danielle, who is so sweet, so responsive, so normal, as opposed to her sister – can only be so because of her sister’.
Fragments of this documentary appear later: under the influence of the drugs administered by Breton, Collier imagines herself interpolated into this documentary, playing the part of a Dominique who is still physically attached to Danielle. In this hallucinatory sequence, De Palma cuts between 16mm monochrome footage of the Loisel Institute and close-ups of Breton taken from Collier’s point of view and, in the manner of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), filmed using a fisheye lens that distorts our perspective. Armond White compares this sequence with the Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) (2000: 132). However, there’s a major difference in that in the hallucinatory sequence within Sisters, Collier imagines the Loisel Institute through the lens of a media representation of it, seeing herself as part of the 16mm monochrome documentary shown to her by McLennen: ‘De Palma depicts the subconscious in modern, media savvy ways. Grace’s fear of experience gets its tone from the horror she felt seeing the documentary of the Blanchion Siamese twins’ separation’ (ibid.). For White, the sequence ‘resembles an LSD trip’ and, although it has a precedent in the dream sequence in Spellbound, it therefore ‘references a new generation’s sense of altered reality and paranoia through drug culture, the ultimate retreat from social responsibility’ (ibid.: 133). The withdrawal from social responsibility can be seen in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, represented in L B Jefferies’ self-imposed isolation from the world in his apartment (and his desire to experience the world around him as a voyeur), and in Sisters via Collier’s retreat at the end of the film to the comforts of her childhood bedroom, whose walls are adorned with dolls and posters for The Beatles (see ibid.: 134). As White notes, ‘[i]n Sisters, the use of the TV frame establishes a self-consciousness about watching, about the media and its reframed reality’ (ibid.: 128).
This ‘media savvy’ approach is highlighted in the film’s direct references to the clichés of cinematic thrillers. When Collier first enlists the help of Larch, they hold a conversation in Larch’s van, disguised as a workman’s vehicle. Larch tells Collier that he will get access to Danielle’s apartment, but Collier must watch from her own apartment and ring the telephone if Danielle returns home. ‘All I have to do is know the situation in advance, then I can play it either way’, he tells her. ‘You’ve got to make a wax impression [of the key]’, Collier protests, having seen too many detective dramas. ‘No one does that’, Larch responds, asking her, ‘Have you ever been a detective?’ Collier replies, ‘No, but simple logic suggests a way of doing things’. ‘Please’, Larch protests, ‘this is a craft. I wouldn’t try to teach you how to write magazine articles. Listen, I went to school to learn this: the Brooklyn Institute of Modern Investigation’.
Elsewhere, De Palma foregrounds his debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window when Collier, looking through the window of her apartment, spots the dying Woode through the window of Danielle’s apartment. Again, as in Hitchcock’s film, the window functions as a metaphor for the cinema screen. Highlighting the Brechtian use of split-screen that would, in subsequent films, become one of his trademarks, De Palma presents this sequence using the split-screen effect, allowing the audience to watch the events unfold from both Woode’s and Collier’s perspectives. Later, the film reinforces its debt to Rear Window in a sequence in which Larch manages to gain entry into Danielle’s apartment as Collier watches from her own apartment window. Larch asks Collier to ring Danielle’s telephone number if she sees anyone returning to Danielle’s apartment. Unable to help Larch directly, Danielle watches as Breton returns with the intention of moving the sofa in which Woode’s body is hidden. The sequence strongly resembles the scene in Rear Window in which the injured photojournalist L B Jefferies (James Stewart) watches through his window as his lover Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) investigates the apartment of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), whom the couple suspect has murdered his wife – only for Lisa’s examination of the apartment to be curtailed by the Thorwald’s arrival home. However, in Sisters the gender roles are reversed: in this film, it is a woman (Collier) who is a helpless observer of a man (Larch) that is placed in potential danger as he investigates the apartment that is believed to have been the scene of a murder committed by another woman (Dominique).
As Armond White notes in his examination of the connections between Sisters and Rear Window, by setting Sisters in Staten Island De Palma marks his picture ‘as a film about class’ and inequality, ‘tackl[ing] a new, 1970s social reality that alters Rear Window’s 1950s generic tropes’ and thus establishing a connection between De Palma’s subsequent Hollywood thrillers and his earlier, heavily political, independent films (op cit.: 127). For example, in the opening sequence the ethnicity of Woode is ‘pandered to’ by the producers of ‘Peeping Toms’, who offer him ‘a prize, dinner for two in the “African Room”’ (ibid.: 128). Collier is distrusted by the police because of the anti-authoritarian bias in her articles, and talking to an editor over the telephone she highlights the racist assumptions of the police who refuse to investigate the crime: ‘A white woman kills her black lover and those racist cops couldn’t care less’, she declares. For Chris Dumas, Sisters offers a ‘step-by-step remake of Psycho with the notable substitution of an articulate, educated, upwardly mobile African-American man in the place of Janet Leigh, so that after the traumatic murder at the film’s center, the rest of the narrative will hinge on the search for a missing and unnamed black body’ (2012: 136). De Palma seems to share the anti-authoritarian stance of Collier: the police in Sisters are depicted as ineffective, bumbling idiots. As Collier attempts to get the detectives to investigate Danielle’s apartment, De Palma uses split-screen to establish Breton’s efficiency in cleaning up the murder scene and hiding the body, whilst at the same time showing us the detectives’ clumsy and halting ascent to the apartment.
Video
Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, Sisters looks very handsome on this Blu-ray release, which uses the AVC codec. (The disc is dual-layered and locked to region ‘B’.) The 1.78:1 aspect ratio may be a little too tight on the vertical axis (one line in the film’s opening credits is very slightly cropped along the bottom of the frame) but, in comparison with prior DVD releases, opens up the right hand side of the frame. Contrast is very good, and the image is detailed and comfortably handles the transition from the 35mm film stock used for the majority of the film and the 16mm inserts from the documentary about the Loisel Institute. A fair bit of the film is shot in interiors that are lit low, and it’s possible that some sequences were shot on film stock that was pushed slightly to accommodate this. Certainly, the film as a whole has a fairly heavy, and totally natural grain structure. It’s a very pleasing presentation of the film.
(NB Images used in this review are for illustration purposes and are not intended to represent the transfer contained on this Blu-ray – for direct grabs from the Blu-ray, we recommend following the DVDBeaver link on the comparison page.)
Audio
Audio is presented via a LPCM 1.0 mono track. This is clean and audible throughout. Dialogue is mostly in English, with some lines (a conversation between Danielle and Dominique) in French with burnt-in English subtitles. Optional English subtitles for the hard of hearing are provided.
Extras
All extra features are in HD.
‘What the Devil Hath Joined Together’ (47:02): a ‘visual essay’ on Sisters, by Justin Humphreys.
Humphreys opens with Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Thelma Ritter’s assertion in that film that ‘We have become a race of Peeping Toms’. ‘Sisters is a film fixated on voyeurism’, Humphreys notes before discussing Sisters’ twin origins in a Life magazine article about two Soviet Siamese twins, and an image that De Palma had already conceived, of a dying man writing the word ‘Help’ in blood on a window.
The characters of Danielle Breton and Grace Collier were written for Kidder and Salt, who were good friends before the film was made. Sisters is clearly heavily indebted to Hitchcock, especially Psycho and the theme of a character who has internalised the personality of a dead relative: Humphreys compares the scene in which Janet Leigh overhears the conversation between Norman and his mother, with the scene in which Woode overhears the conversation between Danielle and Dominique.
One area in which De Palma differs from Hitchcock, Humphreys argues, is in the brutality of his murder setpieces. Another overriding technique is the use of cross tracking shots: a tracking shot which is intercut with a reverse tracking shot of the same character, which encourages identification with the character and increases suspense. Again, this is a technique that Hitchcock deployed in Psycho.
Humphreys discusses some of the film’s debts to specific films by Hitchcock in some detail. Several sequences in the film are heavily indebted to Rear Window: Grace Collier’s name is a nod towards Grace Kelly, and the sequence in which Larch investigates Danielle’s apartment whilst Collier watches from her window recalls the sequence in Rear Window in which James Stewart watches as Kelly and Ritter investigate the apartment of Raymond Burr’s wife-killer. The stowing of the body in the sofa recalls Hitchcock’s Rope.
Humphreys discusses De Palma’s previous films and the ways in which Sisters deviated from them: where his earlier films had been dominated by improvisation and a freeform approach to narrative, Sisters was more tightly scripted ‘and heavily storyboarded’. The film was a more conventional thriller that moved away from De Palma’s more political early work and also downplayed the comic elements in his earlier films. Nevertheless, there’s a subversive element in terms of the film’s depiction of Collier, an anti-establishment journalist who highlights the racism of the police.
Humphreys discusses De Palma’s use of split screen and his use of iris shots throughout the film. ‘The very first shot in Sisters is an act of voyeurism within an act of voyeurism within an act of voyeurism’, he reminds us: Woode watches Danielle, believing himself to be unobserved, but he’s being watched by the television audience, who are being watched by the film’s audience. ‘Peeping Toms’ is a parody of Candid Camera which ‘not only establishes Sister’s voyeuristic themes’ but also alludes back to De Palma’s Hi Mom! in which Robert De Niro’s character is fascinated with filming city dwellers through their windows.
Humphreys discusses De Palma’s work with Salt, William Finley and Charles Durning. He also engages with the changes made to the original script and also some of the minor errors (for example, the inconsistency in the colour of William Finley’s coat, the changes in the direction of the lettering on the birthday cake that Wood buys for Danielle).
Cast and Crew Interviews
- Jennifer Salt (10:19)
Salt discusses her work in horror films and admits she has ‘no real affinity with the genre’ but loves ‘playing around in that sandbox’. She says De Palma ‘knows exactly who he is and exactly what he wants’ and says he ‘doesn’t talk about the process’.
Salt discusses her shared past with De Palma and screenwriter Louisa Rose at the Sarah Lawrence College and states that De Palma’s projects there, as a graduate student, were largely Brechtian. She says that De Palma is ‘a great stylist’ and ‘somebody who works totally from his id’.
She talks about Margot Kidder’s performance and the logistics involved with De Palma’s use of split screen. Salt also discusses Charles Durning’s involvement and the casting of Salt’s own mother as the mother of her screen character.
- Louise Rose (writer) (10:27)
Rose discusses her love of suspense rather than horror predicated on graphic thrills. She reflects on her history as a writer. She initially believed she would be an actress but discovered an affinity for writing and the events that led her to studying at Sarah Lawrence College. She suggests that a writer on a film ‘is sort of more like a silk worm’, arguing that film writing is ‘a small part’ of the process. She suggests she is more of a theatre writer, and puts forward the idea that ‘plays have […] a more logical structure than film’.
Rose argues that rather than being a Hitchcock imitator, De Palma ‘was taking some of the tools from Hitchcock’s toolbox’. She also discusses the casting of an African American actor as Wood. ‘Do I see it as Freudian?’, she asks; ‘Of course it’s Freudian. Everything’s Freudian. Except that we’ve all corrected Freud’, switching out the aspects of the Freudian worldview ‘that we don’t agree with’. She connects the ideas of the split-screen technique and the theme of ‘split personality’, which was a popular idea at the time (she cites The Three Faces of Eve as an example). She also talks about the significance of having a female killer, which ‘became something kind of exciting for filmmakers’ – either because it was ‘part of the filmmakers’ psychopathology’ or simply because it represented a new approach to the genre.
- Paul Hirsch (editor) (17:14)
Hirsch talks about his first meeting with De Palma. He discusses Greetings and Hi Mom!, which was originally conceived as a sequel to Greetings, Son of Greetings. Hi Mom! was the first film Hirsch edited, and he suggests that the film was not ‘shot in the conventional manner’ and owing to the ‘film within a film’ approach, it was a difficult picture to edit together. De Palma apparently couldn’t use Hirsch as the editor on Get to Know Your Rabbit because Hirsch ‘was not in the union at that time’. When faced with a dilemma during the editing of Sisters, Hirsch looked to Psycho for inspiration, which led to the hiring of Bernard Hermann as the writer of the score. Like Rose, he establishes that De Palma isn’t an ‘imitator’ of Hitchcock but has a similar worldview: they’re both ‘cold people’, Hirsch suggests, with a sadistic streak.
Hirsch talks about the use of split-screen as a Brechtian ‘distancing device’, which is ‘in line with Brian’s objective and distance from people’. De Palma ‘has a scientific detachment from people and sees them almost as clinical objects, in a sense’. Hirsch says he was disappointed when Brian progressed from Obsession to Carrie, as Hirsch felt that De Palma should move away from horror films and thought Carrie ‘was a step back’ because it was ‘too much like Sisters’. However, he ‘didn’t count on the humanising element that Sissy Spacek [and Piper Laurie] brought to the character’.
- Jeffrey Hayes (unit manager) (5:06)
Hayes, the unit manager, discusses his work on Sisters, his ‘first picture’. The production began on location at Staten Island. The ferry ride, he says, offered a period of relaxing before beginning the working day and after completing shooting for the day. Hayes discusses De Palma’s ‘sly sense of humour’. Hayes talks about his progression from Sisters to Malick’s Badlands and back to De Palma again with Phantom of the Paradise. Sisters ‘has endured because it’s not just a horror movie. It’s so much more’, he says.
- William Finley (audio only, excerpt) (6:16)
Finley talks about his involvement with Sisters. He says the film was ‘shot very quickly and very professionally’. Finley discusses Kidder and De Palma’s first meetings. Finley reflects on his performance as Dr Breton and the methods he and De Palma used to ‘make it look like he was the bad guy’.
‘The De Palma Digest’ (31:02). This is an overview of De Palma’s career by online film critic Mike Sutton, who narrates (using a frustratingly poor mic) over stills and clips from De Palma’s films. Sutton provides a discussion of De Palma’s early life and a chronological overview of his films. Slightly disappointingly, De Palma’s interesting early films up to Sisters are given fairly short shrift (they’re covered within less than five minutes), reinforcing the popular notion that De Palma’s career proper began with Sisters; and more could perhaps have been said about De Palma’s movement from independent productions to Hollywood, and back to the world of independent productions (with Femme Fatale, 2002, and Passion, 2012). There’s a hint of biographism to this piece, but thankfully it avoids focusing on phatic gossip. It’s overly descriptive at times, anecdotal and frequently highly subjective: there’s an annoyingly offhand dismissal of the claims that De Palma’s films are misogynistic - which may be predicated on an aberrant reading of the films, which Robin Wood has suggested may be seen as crypto-feminist fables, but nevertheless has an element of legitimacy and deserves more than a kneejerk assertion that such claims are ‘arrant nonsense’; furthermore, one may easily take issue with the description of the ‘bookend’ sequences in Casualties of War as ‘embarrassing’. Nevertheless, this short feature provides an interesting précis of De Palma’s body of work.
Theatrical trailer (0:57)
International poster gallery (0:22)
Overall
Sisters is a fascinating film. It is a major picture within De Palma’s career, marking a transition from the independently-produced satires of his early career to the glossy Hollywood thrillers for which he is more famous. However, as noted above Sisters shows continuity with De Palma’s earlier films, exploring social issues through the lens of its thriller narrative. As with many of De Palma’s thrillers, the film owes a clear debt to Hitchcock – notably in the theme of doubling and the exploration of multiple identities. However, although some scenes have clear precedents in Hitchcock’s work, and in terms of narrative structure there is a clear lineage from Psycho to Sisters, De Palma brings a number of innovations to the proverbial table – many of them aesthetic (for example, his inspired use of split-screen).
This Blu-ray release contains an excellent presentation of the film and a very good range of contextual material. It thus comes with a very strong recommendation.
References:
Allen, Richard, 2011: ‘Hitchcock’s Legacy’. In: Leitch, Thomas & Poague, Leland (eds), 2011: A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. London: Wiley-Blackwell: 572-90
Dumas, Chris, 2012: Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible. London: Intellect Books
Leitch, Thomas, 2010: ‘How to Steal from Hitchcock’. In: Boyd, David & Palmer, R Barton (eds), 2010: After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality. University of Texas Press: 251-70
McElhaney, Joe, 2006: The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. State University of New York Press
White, Armond, 2000: ‘Eternal Vigilance in Rear Window’. In: Belton, John (ed), 2000: Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’. Cambridge University Press: 118-40
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