ENF.2010 Hitchcock and His Modern Heirs
Alfred Hitchcock is the best known "brand name" in the history of cinema. He has been called everything from a genius filmmaker and a seminal 20th-century artist who profoundly explores many aspects of storytelling, style, gender, sexuality, race, politics, society and culture to a brutally cold and cynical hack who shamelessly manipulates his audiences. Clearly, the latter sentiment has faded: The 2012 international critics' poll conducted every ten years by Sight & Sound magazine voted Vertigo (1958) the greatest film of all time. Hitchcock's quotations, public appearances and cameos within his films are legendary, and his films and TV work have been widely quoted from, imitated and spoofed. He is called the "master of suspense" but has also been dubbed the "Shakespeare of cinema" partly because both are the most written-about of artists within their respective media. Hitchcock and his films have been analyzed from every possible perspective and this course introduces various approaches. We will study many of his most acclaimed and beloved works, including The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Psycho and The Birds. We will consider Hitchcock's background and career for valuable sociological contexts and pay attention to his famous working methods plus his key collaborations with stars, designers, writers, cinematographers, composers and especially his wife Alma Reville. Major themes, styles, techniques and tropes will be surveyed and we will situate "Hitchcock" within historical, marketing, censorship, aesthetic and sociological contexts. The final unit of the course will consider more recent films and other media that show his influence, and the final student assignment will be to pick a film, TV show, video game, podcast or website and argue persuasively how it is "Hitchcockian."