Hitchcock and Film History

Module code: HA3438

With an active career spanning 50 years of film history, Alfred Hitchcock is one of the few undisputed auteurs and remains one of the most popular (and often controversial) of all film-makers. This module explores Hitchcock’s unique place in the history of film, covering his career from his early British silent pictures of the 1920s through to his ‘maturity’ in Hollywood. 

We will consider not only the thematic and formal aspects of Hitchcock’s film-making but also the historical and cultural contexts in which we worked: Britain and Hollywood, from the studio system to New Hollywood, between the popular and the avant-garde. We will also explore how studying Hitchcock’s films has become a paradigm of film studies, taking in a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches including formalism, authorship, psychoanalysis, feminist critiques of popular cinema, reception studies and adaptation.