Tom Cohen's 'Hitchcock's Cryptonymies' Decodes Geopolitics of Cinema

Tom Cohen's book 'Hitchcock's Cryptonymies' redefines Alfred Hitchcock not as a filmmaker but as a code name for a geopolitical operation against the aura of Enlightenment postmodernism. Cohen analyzes Hitchcock's films frame by frame to reveal how they script planetary control of vision through information transmission machines. He identifies visual signifiers planted like spies, leading to images stripped of figuration that cancel themselves in graphic caesurae. Cohen terms this the 'war of the birds'—a total war of recording machines against perceptual apparatuses. The book argues that what sees us are mnemotechnological programs readable only by tearing the visible, and that images are inscriptions on a body that still believes itself seen and seeing. Catherine Perret's review positions Cohen's work as the first to problematize cinema as an art of images, following Walter Benjamin's essay on technical reproducibility with theoretical radicality and micro-analytic caution.