Case Studies : Rebecca

Below you will a number of resources that relate to Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. The resources provide an example of more traditional film studies scholarship.

Production Background

One of the best resources for researching the production background of a film is the American Film Institute Catalog, which you can search by film title, actors, directors, producers, etc.

In the entry for Rebecca, you will find credits, a plot summary, and a summary of memos detailing the film's production and the friction between director Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick.

Locating Useful Books and Articles

You can locate articles on Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock and related topics by searching in one of our Film Studies : Criticism and Scholarship databses.

You can also search the CAT for book-length studies of relevant topics. Below you will find listed examples of books found in the CAT, organized by general topic.

Alfred Hitchcock

• François Truffaut, Hitchcock
• Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film
• Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films
• William Rothman, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze

David O. Selznick

• Leonard J. Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick : the rich and strange collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood
• Ronald Haver, David O. Selznick's Hollywood
• David O. Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick

Film Melodrama

• Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (editors), Melodrama : Stage, Picture, Screen
• Marcia Landy (editor), Imitations of Life : A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama
• Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning : History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk
• Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia : History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950

Feminist Film Theory and Criticism

• Tania Modleski, Women Who Knew Too Much : Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
• Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror : The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
• Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures

The Rebecca Project
Located in the Music and Media Center on the 2nd floor of West Pattee, this excellent multimedia CD-ROM by Lauren Rabinovitz, Greg Easley, and Robert McBurney contains movie clips, photographs, critical essays (with hypertext), and rarely seen primary documents. Designed for interactive, flexible use in developing and improving skills in cinema analysis, history, and criticism through the examination of a American cultural history, and of how Alfred Hitchcock and Selznick addressed American female audiences on the eve of World War II.

Page originally created by Brian Bialkowski under the direction of Debora Cheney, Foster Communications Librarian