Authorship & Cinema: Hitchcock and Renoir

Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir are commonly regarded as two of the greatest filmmakers in history, yet their cinematic styles stand in sharp contrast to one another. In this course, we will survey the careers of these two directors, viewing a representative selection of their films and considering the national production contexts in which they worked. Most importantly, we will engage in careful analysis of their works in order to understand the ways in which their approaches to film style resulted in sharply contrasting ideas of cinema and the world. Films screened will include: The 39 Steps, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho (Hitchcock); Toni, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Grande Illusion, Rules of the Game (Renoir). (FMMC 0101 or 0102)