"If every authentic work of art bears a murderous aspect and calls for its creator's death and allows his rebirth, these conditions...are intrinsic to the very medium of film. Every film image is a death mask of the world. The world of every film is past. The camera fixes its living subjects, possesses their life. They are reborn on the screen, creatures of the film's author and ourselves. But life is not fully breathed back into them. They are immortal, but they are always already dead. The beings projected on the screen are condemned to a condition of death-in-life from which they can never escape. What lures us into the world of a film may be a dream of triumphing over death, holding death forever at bay. But Psycho decisively demonstrates what Hitchcock's work has always declared: the world of a film is not a private island where we may escape the conditions of our existence. At the heart of every film is a truth we already know: we have been born into the world and we are fated to die." --William Rothman