Martin Lefebvre, "On Food, Bodies, Cannibals, and Serial Killers: Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972) and Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey (1999)"

Martin Lefebvre is Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, and author of author of Psycho: de la figure au musee imaginaire (1997).

The memory image was conceived during the Renaissance as a specific form of knowledge based on analogies and likenesses, as a figure, but not in the sense of a textual manifestation even if it was shaped by rhetorical thought. Unlike the trope which is fixed, the figure remains open and is subject to transformations as the mind (as well as culture) acquires new representations. Hitchcock's Frenzy and Egoyan's Felicia's Journey stage a metaphor of capitalism as cannibalism, using our personal and collective (ana)logic, our memory-image of the serial killer connected to food and its representations.

Suggested Reading:

Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, London, Routledge Press, 1966

Martin Lefebvre, "On Memory and Imagination in the Cinema," in New Literary History, vol 30, no 2, 1999

Martin Lefebvre,"Eisenstein, Rhetoric and Imaginicity: Toward a Revolutionary Memoria", Screen, vol 41, no 4, 2000

Suggested Screening (on reserve for the workshop):

Frenzy by Alfred Hitchcock, 1972

Felicia's Journey by Atom Egoyan, 1999