Rebecca (1940)Rebecca (1940)

Abstract “Rebecca (1940): The impure object of vision” focuses on the elaborate introduction to Manderley, comprising a set of three shots, and which represents one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most enticing formal compositions. From the opening reference to Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist landmark, Un Chien Andalou (1929), to the visual style that connects the gothic world of Daphne du Maurier’s novel to the Expressionist mise-en-scène aesthetics of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, the sequence is an interrogation of cinema’s elemental visuality. This chapter argues that the introduction to Manderley was not only a forceful enunciation of a visual style for Hitchcock but that, in its impure assemblage of aesthetic currents of the European avant-garde, Rebecca represents a profound tension in the evolution of what Hitchcock later called “pure cinema.”