ENG 5049 Summer 2023 Parker-Flynn

We will approach film theory organically through an examination of Alfred Hitchcock's body of work; not only have his films been analyzed through a variety of theoretical approaches, including structural, psychoanalytic and feminist, many of these strains of film theory are indebted to formal analyses of Hitchcock films for their very basis. We will read major works of film theory by Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Heath, Bellour, Mulvey, Modelski, and we will address the complex historico-theoretical relation between theory and cinema with a particular focus on Hitchcock. We will further consider Hitchcock's films as instruments that allow for the displacement of anxiety and the dispossession of socially unacceptable desires, fears, and traumatic memories in a psychoanalytic context.

Additionally, we will address these films in the context of adaptation studies, and spend time analyzing how Hitchcock straddles the classificatory triad realist-modernist-postmodernist, paying attention to the influence of British Romanticism on films such The Birds and Vertigo, while also studying how "the master of suspense" believed that his process of artistic composition was akin to that of Edgar Allan Poe, especially through films such as Rope and Rear Window. Additional films of study will include The Lodger, Psycho and Marnie.