Gertrude is one of Shakespeare’s most ambiguous queens. She is a role that compresses arguments about sexuality, maternal authority, dynastic legitimacy, and conscience into remarkably few lines. Yet her afterlives are abundant. Read alongside the chronicles that prefigure Hamlet (Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest), Shakespeare’s queen stands at the junction of piety and power; read through Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, she is reframed within an Oedipal optics; read through Howard...

Figure 1. Ingrid Bergman in " Notorious" Alfred Hitchcock’s most unsettling effects are not built from chases or killings but from faces that do too little and hands that do too much. His characters are caught between what they mean and what they must pretend to mean, a performance-within-performance where gestures must advance the fiction for other characters while broadcasting contradictory emotions. Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock is a romantic ironist, staging scenes that both...

Realism in cinema, particularly within the Italian Neorealism movement and its global reverberations, represents a profound shift in...