Hitchcock's Echoes

As one of the most titanic film artists of the 20th century, Alfred Hitchcock had a degree of stylistic influence over many young directors, but he attracted very few genuine imitators. Whereas everyone wanted to use suspense as one of many filmmaking tools, only a handful of subsequent artists tried to become masters of the thriller, and follow the riveting (and sometimes perverse) logic of Hitchcock’s genre.

This academic course will trace some of the artists who, in their own ways, tried to take up the mantle as Masters of Suspense. These descendants span decades and continents, but they each adopt the core narrative tensions and virtuosic showmanship of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. However, they apply these themes towards their own ends, and in so doing, bathe their worlds in Hitchcock’s light. What does Vertigo’s spiral have to tell us about occupied Korea? What does Rear Window mean in the paranoid 1970s? And how were directorial suspense-ratcheting and
showmanship leveraged to develop a smash hit brand of “social thriller” in the 2010s?

No expertise required -- feel free to bring popcorn.

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St. Paul Community Education: Wednesdays 6:00- 9:00 PM 7/12, 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9

**Class will cap at 15 students.**

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Session 1: Revisiting Hitchcock's Legacy

The class will kick off with a quick Hitchcock roundup focusing on his identifiable style, his preferred genres, and his unique place in film history vis a vis New and Old Hollywood. While Hitch began his career in silent films, his most historically significant films were primarily released in the 50s and 60s. As such, he is a figure whose career spans the breadth of the early cinema and Old Hollywood eras, and one whose significant contributions just narrowly predated the death of Old Hollywood. Hitchcock’s late career narrowly overlapped with the onset of the New Hollywood, but his films can sometimes feel as if they were made on a different planet. We will discuss this Hitchcockian aura, whether it is a real or false impression, and where we can see his influence on later eras of filmmaking. 

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Session 2: "Sisters" & Reanimating Hitchcock with Political Electricity

We begin our discussion of Hitchcock’s imitators with the most notorious one of the bunch: Brian De Palma. After the failure of his first Hollywood movie, a radically-inflected, Godard-inspired studio comedy, De Palma returned to New York City to cook up a new brand of Hitchcockian thriller with Sisters – one that mixed the 3 formal precision of the Master’s 50s and early 60s fare with the political resonance of late 60s and 70s independent cinema. The types of thrillers would inform the next 45 years of De Palma’s filmmaking, but their critical value is still in dispute. While often derided as pale imitations, De Palma’s films incorporate explicit politics and a self reflexive visual aesthetic that constitute a wholly distinct artistic point-of-view.

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Session 3: "Get Out" & the Racial Politics of the Gaze

After a career in comedy sketches, Jordan Peele initially strikes serious movie viewers as an unlikely horror director, let alone a worthy successor of Hitchcock himself. Yet, Peele’s directorial film debut Get Out rightfully garners commercial, academic, and artistic acclaim. Peele frequently contends with comparisons to Hitchcock when discussing his own films, noting that he finds Hitchcock to be “kind of a creep” while adamant that Hitchcock’s influence looms: “I think I often ask myself, 'what if Hitchcock worked with black actors?' Those are my favorite movies that have never been made." In this class, we will consider the unique intersection of humor and horror, its opportunity for political discourse, and how Peele transcends frontiers that Hitchcock attempts but rarely passes.

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Session 4: "The Handmaiden" and Hitchcock Goes to Korea

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden drips with Hitchcock’s style and narrative sensibilities. But it belongs to a cultural context that is wholly different from midcentury America or pre-war Britain. This cultural transposition of Hitchcockian material into occupied Korea allows Director Park the tools to explore a whole swath of gendered and colonial political questions, trading perverse aesthetics for radical social critique. We will also study Park’s place in the history of Korean cinema, some of the aesthetic signatures of Korean films, and these movies have become such a strong international institution.

 

Session 5: "Under the Silver Lake" Postmodernism + The Bad Protagonist

We end our study with a film that creates a modern Hitchcockian protagonist – and one that elicited strong negative reactions from many critics. Andrew Garfield’s behavior is classically inflected – he stalks women much like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, and instrumentalizes them like Cary Grant in Notorious… but in a new context the behavior seems abhorrent. Garfield’s wrong-time status is affirmed within the narrative of the film, but for some people even self-critical works can still come off as indulgent. Does this Garfield’s performance reveal anything new about the “problematic” protagonists of older films? And does the reception (or subtext) of this movie indicate that it is time to lay these characters, themes, and aesthetics to rest?

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There are no required texts to purchase for the course, although there will be supplemental reading for each film that is to be read at home and discussed in class; we will provide these for free via PDF through a weekly email.