Summary:"Despite the particularly short-sighted and obtuse critics who for years have considered Hitchcock merely a lover of useless and dangerous toys, a puritanical, complex fat man who was also obsessed with crime, blood and sex, he has revealed to us that the ordered world we thought we lived in is nothing but a formless chaos and that its apparent order is only a mask continually destined to crumble. [...] There is a sort of lucid, vertiginous and disorienting nihilism in Hitchcock's cinema. It puts our greedy fat man, the one who claimed to offer his audience tranches de gâteau rather than tranches de vie, not only among the greatest creators of forms in the twentieth century [...] but also among the leading exponents of the culture of crisis, which, as Truffaut noted, sets him as alongside other "artists of anxiety" such as Kafka, Dostoevsky and Poe. [...] Hitchcock is one of them, the bearer of a vision that forces us all to look at ourselves in the mirror, and also to see what we would prefer not to see. Even the nothingness embedded in our names and in our identitites, even the emptiness and the cold of our bedrooms."--Back cover