124260 KO Critical Media Analysis (2015W)

Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work spans six decades of British and American cinema, from the silent era through Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ to the ‘New Hollywood’ of the 60s and 70s. Long undervalued as a ‘Master of Suspense’, Hitchcock’s legacy has been reevaluated to that of a modernist auteur who blurred previous distinctions between popular and high culture. As a technical innovator, Hitchcock demonstrated that diverse cinematic techniques could be shaped into a powerful storytelling language. As a storyteller, he showed how this film language could be used to explore various twentieth-century concepts, anxieties, and thematic concerns, from murder and (im)morality to eroticism and shared guilt, love and duty, psychoanalysis and death. For students interested in developing greater media literacy in regard to film and popular culture, Hitchcock’s works are vital texts, and his influence on contemporary directors from Martin Scorsese to Christopher Nolan is profound and lasting.

In this course we will watch and discuss a key Hitchcock film from each era (short secondary articles will be provided in electronic form or made available for photocopying) in order to introduce students to the central theoretical approaches and conceptual/technical tools of film and critical media studies. In the process, students will gain greater critical appreciation of (1) the technical tools of film by exploring how Hitchcock conveys narrative with images rather than dialogue, creates meaning through the framing of shots, and solicits certain effects through sound and editing; (2) the history of film by considering how Hitchcock exploits and evolves various film schools and genres (Soviet montage, German Expressionism, French New Wave); and (3) various theoretical concepts and analytical methodologies associated with film and visual text analysis (visual Semiotics, Gender studies, Psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism). Thematic and theoretical topics for discussion will include: ‘The Double Chase Plot’; ‘Doppelgängers’; ‘Erotics & Voyeurism’; ‘Love & Duty’; ‘Shared Guilt’; ‘Meta-Cinema’; ‘Ideology’; ‘Representations of Gender’.