The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Catalog description

In this course, we will examine whether Hitchcock's films can be said to constitute a coherent 'body" of work - identifying in the process potential stylistic idiosyncracies and thematic preoccupations. And we will try to come to some understanding of what is gained and what lost by thinking in these terms. We will use Hitchcock's desire to develop a rigorously cinematic mode of presentation as a means of opening a discussion about the ways films "speak". And we will wonder, along with a handful of contemporary critics, what kind of viewer the films seek to construct. We will take the films' explicit interest in watching as a point of departure for an analysis of voyeurism and its centrality in contemporary western culture. Finally, and not incidentally, we will use the occasion the course provides to spend time watching a number of engaging films. Fulfills core Visual and Performing Arts requirement. (VPA)