A Film Canon

Opening with bewildering streams of commuters, North By Northwest takes place almost exclusively in transitory public spaces, reconfiguring industrial co-ordinates around a series of nascent, post-industrial voids, and individual service around the radically disorienting demands of the Cold War, both of which are extrapolated from the sublime, towering perspectives of the United Nations building, and encapsulated in Hitchcock's first 'wrong man' narrative in which the 'right man' doesn't actually exist, merely reifying the increasing delimitations placed upon privacy, individualism and personal expression. The latter provokes an extraordinary resurgence of Cary Grant's screwball persona, as well as an application of the fundamental screwball conversation - in which the distinctions between speaking 'at' and 'to' are broken down, and every utterance aimed at a real or hypothetical third party - to the more sinister concerns of the psychological and political thriller, evoking a world in which cross-purposes have become constitutively necessary for public discourse, concealing the exploitative demands made upon its inhabitants. As a result, tropes of theatricality and artifice are both omnipresent and completely naturalised, while Roger Thornhill's (Grant) fantastic romance with Eve Kendell (Eve Marie-Saint) is effectively an extended performance, in which both reject their cutting-edge professions (advertising executive and CIA spy) for more antiquated, orienting, concrete identities (electronics manufacturer and industrial designer), proposing a locomotive, modernist curve away from the omniscient, surveilling grid-eye of air travel; that is, a reclamation of cinema in the face of some emergent, if not fully conceivable, entertainment and propaganda technology.