The Camera Lies

Callahan's commentary is chatty, opinionated, engaging, provocative, and fun, and The Camera Lies will provide tonic stimulation to readers. * Thomas Leitch, Hitchcock Annual *
Dan Callahan's The Camera Lies reminds us that Hitchcock Studies are far from complete. With rigorous research, sharp critical analysis, and lively prose Callahan delivers a fresh turn on the director's engagement with and relationship to the actor. At once a figure crucial to his filmmaking as well as a figure resonant with his playful, astute, and sometimes vexing personality, Hitchcock's actor reveals a performance theory executed on the screen quite like no other. * David A. Gerstner, Professor of Cinema Studies, College of Staten Island *
This book is two things Hitchcock loved: a train, hitting every consecutive stop of an unmatched career, taking welcome, provocative pauses in out-of-the-way stations; and a dream, unfolding in singular style, full of unexpected visions and intuitive leaps, springing delicious surprises from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence. * Nick Davis, Associate Professor of English, Northwestern University *
Just when such a thing no longer seems possible, here is a fresh, groundbreaking approach to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, centered on the most neglected aspect of his practice — his work with actors. Dan Callahan, writing with grace and wit and no trace of academic jargon, reveals why Hitchcock is more than the sum of his storyboards.Contrary to Hitchcock's self-created image, Callahan presents an artist fully engaged with the connotations of casting and the details of performance. * Dave Kehr, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art *
It is a pleasure to read Dan Callahan's encyclopedic study of Alfred Hitchcock's direction of actors. This is not only because he writes so deftly on matters of the human figure in cinema. But also because Callahan's particular achievement in this work is the skillful articulation of an appreciation that is underpinned by a deeply empathic response to all the humans, including Hitchcock himself, who composed the director's pictures across a very long career. * Professor Catherine Grant, Birkbeck, University of London *
Dan Callahan takes Alfred Hitchcock's often-retold quip that 'all actors should be treated like cattle,' and shapes the one-liner into a cohesive thesis about the kind of performance that best suited that old master's aims...(Callahan's) observations are bright, often wry. He is also keenly - nay, insistently - interested in the sexuality of the players, both expressed and hidden. * New York Times *
Callahan is the Plutarch of American film critics. * Los Angeles Review of Books *