Introduction: Why Hitchcock?

Aside from the convention that artists’ centenaries are good moments for reassessing their work, several factors combined to give this essay its particular orientation. Designing a course on Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) during the late 1990s, I was obliged to address the question of what might constitute an appropriate critical discourse at that historical moment. On the one hand, I had noted the marked contemporary turn towards British film history in academic Film Studies in the UK and beyond and wished to connect with that movement. On the other hand, and not least, I had also become increasingly uneasy about the unseemly haste with which the category of class had been evacuated from political and cultural discourse in general and from Film Studies in particular.

To mount a dedicated course on a named director might seem rather old-fashioned, but the Film Studies cat can be skinned in any number of ways and I retain an enormous personal investment in the pleasure to be derived from certain directorial signatures, not least Hitchcock’s. That said, the trajectory of film theory over the last three decades of the twentieth century made (and still today makes) it problematic simply to erect a descriptive/celebratory course on any filmmaker. Greatly influenced by Robert E. Kapsis, my syllabus therefore took the form of examining the successive critical paradigms which had been brought to bear on Hitchcock's films: the early ‘master of suspense’ paradigm; the auteurist (in its French, British and North American variants and its structuralist and narratological inflections); the feminist/psychoanalytic; and, most recently, the gay/lesbian/queer. Needless to say, those paradigms do not succeed each other in any neat, hermetically sealed way, but are heavily interpenetrated. At the time of designing my course, there were also some stirrings towards Hitchcock among reader reception critics, but not yet a paradigm. The most curious absences from this list were, of course, race and class: those missing paradigms became an additional topic of the course and, in the case of class, this essay's central focus.