Hitchcock / Theory

In the later 20th century, Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation underwent a significant critical revaluation. No longer viewed as merely the “Master of Suspense,” he—and his work—became central objects of poststructuralist thought,  embraced not only by film theorists but by world-renowned philosophers and critical theorists. This is a course on both Hitchcock’s films and 20th- and 21st-century critical theory. In conjunction with the films, we will read key texts by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Freud, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Rancière, Tzvetan Todorov, Slavoj Žižek (and others). We will develop skills in close cinematic analysis and the parsing of theoretical texts, while exploring keywords in literary, media, and performance theory (narrative, apparatus, ideology, dispositif, subject, performativity, affect, gaze, fetish, frame, screen, theatricality, etc.).