Marnie is the culmination of Hitchcock's concept of cinema as an artificially fabricated construct; it is also among the films in which one senses him most emotionally engaged. The paradox is only apparent: it is in the nature of Hitchcock's art that it is most intense when it leaves daily reality, the "normal," behind to explore unnatural relationships and extreme mental states, especially the obsessive compulsive, in a kind of abstraction only cursorily disguised as naturalism. (p. 48)

The camera, almost invariably objective, moves to exclude some characters from the frame and include others: there is a continual sense of a world out there beyond the confines of the screen, of other lives coexisting simultaneously, a world too vital and complex for the camera to contain. At the same time, although every artist in film guides the spectator's eye (and the mind behind the eye), the objectivity of presentation...