SOURCE: Hemmeter, Thomas. “Adaptation, History, and Textual Suppression: Literary Sources of Hitchcock's Sabotage.” In Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, edited by John D. Simons, pp. 149-61. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.

In the following essay, Hemmeter reviews the textual antecedents of Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage, proposing that the director used both the novel and play versions of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.

In reacting against ahistorical textual readings of films, the field of cinema studies embraces the historical analysis of films both as products of historical forces and as producers of historical perspectives. Such studies generally examine the production practices of studios, the social conditions of audiences, and the economic and ideological pressures on filmmakers and the film industry. While this historical criticism does valuable service by filling in the historical...