Alfred Hitchcock

Essay – memory and amnesia in the films of Alfred Hitchcock

by Jon on July 25, 2011

Essay written in 2007 for a university film class.  Filmography to be added. In the films of Alfred Hitchcock memory and amnesia often play an important part in the narrative and enable the plot to unfold.  Memory and the loss of it are used as narrative tools by Hitchcock, for example in films such as [...]

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Essay – Women and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

by Jon on July 25, 2011

Film exam question, 2006. Do  you agree that in Hitchcock’s films women ‘are inevitably made into passive objects of male voyeuristic and sadistic impulses?’   In 1975 the essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema’ was published by psychoanalytical feminist theorist Laura Mulvey.   In the essay Mulvey argued that a person watching a screen would [...]

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Authorship in film

by Jon on July 25, 2011

    More about the concept of the auteur, written for a film class in 2006. How useful to an understanding of film is authorship?   Many film critics and theorists believed the concept of authorship is important to the understanding of film.  The idea of an author, or an ‘auteur’, arose from the ‘auteur [...]

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The Auteur Theory

by Jon on July 25, 2011

Notes on the auteur theory, 2004   Auteur is French for author. The auteur theory is a way of reading and appraising films through the imprint of an auteur, usually meant to be the director.   André Bazin (1918-1958), the editor of France’s foremost film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, proclaimed Howard Hawks one of the [...]

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