By investigating the fashion aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), this article argues for a heightened level of analytical attention to the many meanings of costume choices in the overall design of films. The text focuses on Cary Grant’s elegant, but famously manhandled suit as the film progresses, and how to understand its function and provenance in the grander scheme of ‘things’ in the film. In addition, Helen Rose’s discarded costume suggestions for Eva Marie Saint’s character are discussed – and how Hitchcock personally took on the role as personal shopper for Eve Kendall, Saint’s role. Further, the article highlights the collaborative nature of the film’s production and its pivotal ideas rather than argue for auteurist absolutism and a Hitchcock-alone approach to the film’s meaning. Ernest Lehman famously described his work on North by Northwest as an attempt to script ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures’.

Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.

Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

This chapter discusses the overlaps and differences in how film audiencesencountered feature films ‒ projected in one stretch or via breaks for reelchanges. By charting the trade discourse, the text shows that Americanfilm theaters gradually adopted a two-projector system during the earlyto mid-1910s and thus screened multi-reel feature films without pauses.In contrast, Swedish f ilm theaters retained the one-projector modelwith breaks well into the 1920s, and some did not switch over to twoprojectors until the breakthrough for sound. This non-uniformity forexhibition practices challenges notions about a hegemonic regime foraudience absorption in the engagement with the story world. Breaks dur-ing projection clearly offset such a mindset and instead offered modes ofintermittent and distracted engagement in fictions presented as recordedrather than just given.