The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT UK 64

MARNIE dir Hitchcock US 1964

This film is a thriller, set in contemporary USA. Its
performances, locations, sets, editing and so on are exemplary
in their service of the conventional thriller's project - to
pose questions, in answering them to propose further questions
and by these means to solicit ever more intense attention from
the audience which is rewarded with conclusive answers in the
final scene. Yet unlike the conventional thriller the mystery
which absorbs us concerns neither who did it, nor how, but
rather why. Alongside the ever increasing sense of urgency
generated by the suspense construction then, are another set
of concerns, the meanings of which extend far beyond the
fictional world proposed here. The film offers a polemic on
behalf of the discourses of psychiatry, demonstrating through
its fictional account first the consequences and then the
origins of a particular traumatic event. In the course of
this polemic the meanings of various concepts central to the
workings of the social order are put in question. Because of
the masterful (I use the word advisedly) and sophisticated
control of the cinematic medium the preferred reading implicit
in the narrative closure is almost irresistable; yet the
central importance of these problematic concepts for
patriarchal hegemony requires our close attention to the
minutiae of the representations constructed. This is perhaps
a case in which we should pay attention to the theoretically
questionable notion of the film's own unconscious - since it
is here that we may find evidence of contemporary fears about
the stability of patriarchal hegemony and the existing social
order.

The struggle between the central characters Mark Rutland (sean
Connery) and Margaret 'Marnie' Edgar (Tippi Hedren) dominates
the narrative. Crudely put, this is a struggle for power.

Yet it is also a struggle over the meanings of power in its

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