ENGL 381-01, Hitchcock and Hitchcockians, Fall 2011

Abstract

Known as the master of suspense and regarded as one of the most influential directors of the twentieth century, Alfred Hitchcock helped define a genre, refine film style, and invent the notion of the director-artist or auteur. His career spanned half a century, participating in the evolution of cinema from silent to sound and black-and-white to color, from the rigid regulations of the studio system to the eventual collapse of the Production Code, from German Expression to postmodernism. His films, which are obsessed with issues of guilt and innocence, mistaken identity, hair-breadth escapes, morbid pathologies, and psychosexual dysfunctions, have compelled and exasperated audiences and critics worldwide. They have also been remade, offered sequels, imitated, parodied, and recycled by filmmakers as dissimilar as Claude Chabrol, Michelangelo Antonioni, Brian de Palma, Mel Brooks, Pedro Almodóvar, and Gus Van Sant. This course offers an investigation of Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre and its influence on diverse films, filmmakers, genres, and even film studies as an academic discipline. We will begin by analyzing Hitchcock's texts; their thematic and stylistic preoccupations; and their formative impact on formalist, feminist, and psychoanalytic film criticism. Then, following Robert Stam's notion of "intertextual dialogism," we will examine how Hitchcockian films and filmmakers have engaged with Hitchcock's cinema.