Opening the Paratext: The Hitchcock Trailer as Assertion of Authorship

As a filmmaker who frequently enjoyed unusual artistic control over his output, Alfred Hitchcock was known for appearing not only in his films but also in their trailers. But while the studios understood that Hitchcock’s appeal was a key part of his films’ selling points, his role in such content was, for the most part, a corollary to the task of having to sell a motion picture. As the director’s influence began to grow and his own sense of authorship began concomitantly to develop, in these trailers (filmic paratexts), Hitchcock, as the author argues, increasingly makes the case for his artistic intentions, mirroring the ambiguous and excessive style of his contemporaneous filmmaking in such promotional material. In so doing, Hitchcock promotes ostensibly ‘closed texts’ not open to interpretation while offering the potential for polysemantic renderings of such texts – opening the paratext. In this way, the trailer serves as both promotional product and critical (self-)appraisal, suggesting in the textual and paratextual construction of the Hitchcock trailer an intersection of the materialism of the commercial package and the abstraction of artistic ambition.