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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 PressAllen, R and Gonzales, S. Ishi Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays: London, British Film Institute 1999Spoto, Donald. Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius N.Y. Ballantine, 1983Gottlieb, S (Ed) Hitchcock on Hitchcock Selected Writings and Interviews: L.A. University of California PressStam, R. Burgoyne, R and Flitterman Lewis, S. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond N.Y. Routledge 1994Mast, G. Cohen M and Braudy L Film Theory and Criticism Introductory Readings 6th Edition Oxford University press 1998Course Reader: Hitchcock’s Film Theory: Reading Theory through Hitchcock.
http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/biblio.htmlHitchcock bibliographies.
http://www.tdfilm.com/
The Definitive Alfred Hitchcock Resource
Recommended Websites
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/ Alfred Hitchcock Scholars MacGuffin website,
associated with The MacGuffin critical journal
http://alfredhitchcock.directorscut.info/ Alfred-Hitchcock.com
http://www.hitchcock.nl/ "Hitchcock Online"
“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”
AdvertisingArt, artists & art historyAlcohol (brandy)BabelBarsBicyclesBirdsBlack sunBlindness, blinds
Blocked speechB.M.The BogBridgesC.A.CatsChanceClothesContact, 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-, con-
Kitchens (food)
Legs. Steps
Libraries (books)
M
Machines
Mae West
Mar-
Mon-
Mother
Newspaper
O
Oak, wood
P,pi (3.14)
Phonography
Signatures 4
PortPostal relaysProfessorsThe publicRReadingSandSeaShots, bombs
Skies, snowStairsSolaritySounds likeTeethToo muchTourismTrains
Signatures 5
Tripods
Umbrella
Underground
X
Zootropology
Etc.,
To be augmented
during the semester
THE LODGER was "the first true Hitchcock film."
Cast Crew
Ivor Novello - The Lodger June Tripp - Daisy BuntingMarie Ault - Mrs. Bunting Arthur Chesney - Mr. Bunting Malcolm Keen - Joe Betts
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)
