Topics in Film History AHIS 3822 Hitchcock

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Topics in Film History AHIS 3822Hitchcocks
Films

• Introduction

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Its all in the details..... (Alfred Hitchcock)
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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 Hitchcocks life and work, with
  particular focus accorded his canonical position
  as a major auteur within the history of film.

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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.

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Week 1

• Introduction Course Overview
• bibliography, assignments, expectations etc
• Screening The Lodger (1927)
• Assignment 1. In class film report (continuous,
  15).

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Required Texts

• Cohen Tom, Hitchcocks Cryptonymies Volume 1
  Secret Agents and Volume 2 War Machines
  University of Minnesota Press 2005 (Available in
  NSCAD U Bookstore)

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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, Post-Structuralism 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 Hitchcocks Film Theory Reading
  Theory through Hitchcock.

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Recommended Websites

• http//faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/bi
  blio.html
• Hitchcock bibliographies.
• http//www.tdfilm.com/
• The Definitive Alfred Hitchcock Resource

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• 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"

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http//www.videouniversity.com/hitchcock.htm

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http//www.labyrinth.net.au/muffin/
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Everything's perverted in a different way.
Alfred Hitchcock

• Hitchcock interview with Ian Cameron and V.F.
  Perkins, Movie, 6, January 1963, pp. 46.
  Reprinted in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Alfred
  Hitchcock Interviews, University Press of
  Mississippi, Jackson, 2003, p. 51

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Jimmie Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1957)
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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).

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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.

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Hitchcock cameo in Young and Innocent (1937)
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• 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.

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• 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)

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AH directing The Mountain Eagle (1926)
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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.

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Class 2

• For others however, class is contextual,
  dynamic and "resonates with political meaning."
  (McNall, et al., 19913). 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.

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Class 3

• As Eric Hobsbawm has argued class "is ideology
  as well as structure." Class consciousness is
  articulated "as a group's awareness and
  understanding of itself that grows out of
  opposition to other groups. (Hobsbawm, 19848).

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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.

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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 dun fou November (1842) Madame Bovary
  (1857)Salammbô (1862)

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• 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

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Hitchcocks 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).

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A Users Guide to Hitchcocks 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

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Signatures 2

• Dancing couples
• Direction
• Disaster
• Dogs
• -ed, Ed
• Doors
• Eggs
• Egypt

• Espionage
• Face
• Fire
• Frame
• Glass, window
• H
• Half-caste
• Handcuffs

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Signatures 3

• Mar-
• Mon-
• Mother
• Newspaper
• O
• Oak, wood
• P,pi (3.14)
• Phonography

• House
• ken-, con-
• Kitchens (food)
• Legs. Steps
• Libraries (books)
• M
• Machines
• Mae West

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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

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Signatures 5

• Tripods
• Umbrella
• Underground
• X
• Zootropology
• Etc.,

• To be augmented
• during the semester

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THE LODGER was "the first true Hitchcock film."
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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
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Week 2

• Lecture Hitchcocks 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 Users Guide to Hitchcocks 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)