Topics in Film History AHIS 3822
Hitchcock’s Films
Introduction
“It’s all in the details.....” (Alfred Hitchcock)
Description
The course will provide students with a critical
survey of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Through lectures, screenings and selected
readings students will be introduced to a wide
range of material on Hitchcock’s life and work,
with particular focus accorded his canonical
position as a major auteur within the history of
film.
Approaches
Various theoretical, methodological and
critical discourses associated with
contemporary film studies will also be
discussed, among them: auteurship,
structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, social
historicism, socio-economist, narratology,
cognitive studies, reception theory,
deconstruction and queer studies.
Week 1
Introduction: Course Overview:
bibliography, assignments, expectations etc:
Screening: The Lodger (1927)
Assignment #1. In class film report
(continuous, 15%).
Required Texts
Cohen Tom, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies
Volume 1 Secret Agents and Volume 2 War
Machines University of Minnesota Press 2005
(Available in NSCAD U Bookstore)
Recommended
Sloan, Jane E. Hitchcock: The Definitive Bibliography L.A.
University of California Press
Allen, R and Gonzales, S. Ishi Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary
Essays: London, British Film Institute 1999
Spoto, Donald. Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius
N.Y. Ballantine, 1983
Gottlieb, S (Ed) Hitchcock on Hitchcock Selected Writings and
Interviews: L.A. University of California Press
Stam, R. Burgoyne, R and Flitterman Lewis, S. New
Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, PostStructuralism and Beyond N.Y. Routledge 1994
Mast, G. Cohen M and Braudy L Film Theory and Criticism
Introductory Readings 6th Edition Oxford University press
1998
Course Reader: Hitchcock’s Film Theory: Reading Theory
through Hitchcock.
Recommended Websites
http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/biblio.html
Hitchcock bibliographies.
http://www.tdfilm.com/
The Definitive Alfred Hitchcock Resource
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/
Alfred Hitchcock Scholars MacGuffin website,
associated with The MacGuffin critical journal
http://alfredhitchcock.directorscut.info/ AlfredHitchcock.com
http://www.hitchcock.nl/ "Hitchcock Online"
http://www.videouniversity.com/hitchcock.htm
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/
“Everything's perverted in a different
way.”
– Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock interview with Ian Cameron and
V.F. Perkins, Movie, #6, January 1963, pp.
4–6. Reprinted in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.),
Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, University
Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2003, p. 51
“
Jimmie Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1957)
A-H Life details
Born. August 13, 1899, London, England
Died. April 29, 1980 at age 81 in Los Angeles,
USA.
He was third and last child of an East End
family whose father William ran a poulterer's
and greengrocer's business and whose mother
Emma came of Irish stock Catholic working
class (lower middle class).
Bio details
• Father dies in 1915,.
• AH leaves St Ignatius a Jesuit School to help
out with the family grocery business.
• Attends night classes in navigation, mecahnics
and drafting at University of London.
• 1915 Begins work at the Henley Telegraph
Company while continuing his night classes in
art history, economics, political science,
drawing and illustration.
Hitchcock cameo in Young and Innocent (1937)
• Hired to Henley's advertising department.
• 1917 fails Army medical exam and excused from
military service. Enlists in th volunteer Royal
Engineers
• Short Story Gas published in Henley's staff magazine
• 1920 takes samples of his ad and illustration work to
Players Lasky, U.S. film company branch in London.
• 1923 Meets future wife Alma Reville a writer and
film editor.
• 1923 Set designer for two successful films
Woman to Woman and The Passionate
Adventure
• Works for Gainsborough Film Co. (1924) and
sent to Germany to UFA studios to meet and
observe F.W. Murnau filming the Last Laugh
• 1925 His boss Michael Balcon assigns H to
first Directors position on The Pleasure
Garden (1924) and The Mountain Eagle
(1926)
AH directing The Mountain Eagle (1926)
Class 1
For many sociologists class, like ideology, is
one-dimensional: one's class is objectively
located and established on the basis of certain
discrete criteria and relatively autonomous
categories and indicators such as: education,
occupation and income.
Class 2
For others however, class is contextual,
dynamic and "resonates with political
meaning." (McNall, et al., 1991:3). E.P.
Thompson's landmark study The Making of the
English Working Class (1963), argued that a
class may participate in its own making as
much as it is made, (class as relational as
distinct from oppositional, although the
differences between the two are often difficult
to locate.
Class 4
In other words, the individual classed subject
comes to know and understand his/her class
position only in terms of their opposition to
others, and this is signified (represented),
through various means as a relation of power.
Early literary influences
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol; Great
Expectations; Oliver Twist; David Copperfield;
Little Dorrit
Edgar Alan Poe: The Raven; The Tell Tale Heart
Gustave Flaubert: Memoirs of a Madman (1838;
Mémoires d’un fou; November (1842); Madame
Bovary (1857);Salammbô (1862)
Oscar Wilde: Picture of Dorian Gray
Thomas De Quincey: Murder as one of the Fine Arts
G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Orthodoxy (1908) The Ballad Of The White Horse
(1911) poetry; Manalive (1912); Father Brown short
stories (detective fiction); Eugenics and Other Evils
John Buchan: The 39 Steps
Hitchcock’s Early Films
Of the nine silent films Hitchcock
directed, all but one — The Mountain
Eagle (1926) — survives. Of the eight
surviving films, only six have appeared
on home video (The Pleasure Garden
(1925) and Downhill (1927) mysteriously
have been neglected). Five of those films
have been released on DVD including
Easy Virtue (1927).
A User’s Guide to “Hitchcock’s Signature
systems”
Advertising
Art, artists & art history
Alcohol (brandy)
Babel
Bars
Bicycles
Birds
Black sun
Blindness, blinds
Blocked speech
B.M.
The Bog
Bridges
C.A.
Cats
Chance
Clothes
Contact, touch
Signatures 2
Dancing couples
Direction
Disaster
Dogs
-ed, Ed
Doors
Eggs
Egypt
Espionage
Face
Fire
Frame
Glass, window
H
Half-caste
Handcuffs
Signatures 3
House
ken-, conKitchens (food)
Legs. Steps
Libraries (books)
M
Machines
Mae West
MarMonMother
Newspaper
O
Oak, wood
P,pi (3.14)
Phonography
Signatures 4
Port
Postal relays
Professors
The public
R
Reading
Sand
Sea
Shots, bombs
Skies, snow
Stairs
Solarity
Sounds like
Teeth
Too much
Tourism
Trains
Signatures 5
Tripods
Umbrella
Underground
X
Zootropology
Etc.,
To be augmented
during the semester
THE LODGER was "the first true Hitchcock
film."
Cast
Ivor Novello - The
Lodger
June Tripp - Daisy
Bunting
Marie Ault - Mrs.
Bunting
Arthur Chesney - Mr.
Bunting
Malcolm Keen - Joe
Betts
Crew
Alfred Hitchcock Director
Alma Reville Assistant Director.
Eliot Stannard Scenario
Ivor Montagu - Editing
/ Titles
C. Wilfred Arnold - Art
Director
Week 2
• Lecture: Hitchcock’s early life.
• Screening: Blackmail (1929)
• Reading: Cohen, Tom. Introduction: Volume I
Secret Agents Part I “Police, Criminals and the
Mediatric State” “The Lodger as Host”, pp 19-44; A
User’s Guide to Hitchcock’s Signature systems”
pp44- 65.
• Recommended Readings: Sloan Hitchcock: The
Definitive Bibliography pp. 1-33 ; 74-78 (Library
reserve)
• Modleski, T: “Hitchcock, Feminism and the
Patriarchal Unconscious” (Reader, library reserve)