HNAR-343: Films of Alfred Hitchcock

This course is not a production film class, but a course that composites possibilities of how to view and interpret an Alfred Hitchcock film, (or a film/sign), alongside an immense history of theoretical and critical writings. The course examines authorship, spectatorship, and identity together with other issues of reflexive film, and film's relationship to issues in painting, theatre, architecture, opera, music and sound, and literature. We view and research Hitchcock?s films by the use of multiple lenses including an expressionist's lens, a surrealist lens/or a psychoanalytical lens, a surveillance/voyeur lens, a semiotic lens, supported by readings by Raymond Bellour, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Delueze, William Rothman, Leland Pougue, Fredric Jameson and others. The course also examines the political and social atmospheres of the times in which the films were made, and identifies the filmographies' affect/effect, its pop cultural manifestation and influence. In connection, the course explores Hitchcock's universal themes, clarifies Hitchcockian space, suspense, objects and the use of the McGuffin, and distinguishes his use of Hamlet persuaded theatre. Starting with the Pleasure Garden in 1927 and ending with Family Plot in 1976, the director made 59 full-length films and scores of television 1/2 hours plots that locate characters in a fear constructed social system.