Rope (with Michael Koresky)

About this episode

Michael Koresky joins the podcast to discuss Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope and its themes of queerness and cinematic technique.

Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back to the podcast Michael Koresky (listen here to his first visit, discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence). Michael is MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, out now from Bloomsbury.Michael joins us to talk about a film from that book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the ‘perfect murder’ cocktail thriller best known for its deceptive formal gambit (shot continuously with “no” cuts) and spectral queerness. We get into: ways around the Production Code, that Technicolor sunset, Farley Granger’s offscreen persona, Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust doc, the film version of trompe l’oeil, teaching classical Hollywood in a contemporary classroom, the lesser-seen These Three (1936) and Crossfire (1947), and more.***The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.You can read all 141 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room—including our current Jonathan Demme issue!—at brightwalldarkroom.com. Feedback and/or…

People in this episode

Hosts: Veronica Fitzpatrick, Chad Perman

Guest: Michael Koresky

Topics covered

• Alfred Hitchcock
• film analysis
• queerness in cinema
• Production Code
• Technicolor
• Hollywood history

Keywords

• Rope
• Alfred Hitchcock
• queerness
• film analysis
• Production Code
• Technicolor
• Hollywood

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MoMI, Reverse Shot, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Bloomsbury

Books & works: Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, Rope, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, These Three, Crossfire

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