“Without Guilt or Remorse”: A Deep Dive into the Life of Hitchcock Star Farley Granger

|Dylan Hawthron| Before we actually start the movie, though, we see the Warner Bros. logo, followed by a screen announcing the lead actors: Farley Granger Mr. Granger appears by arrangement with Samuel Goldwyn Ruth Roman Robert Walker The fine print sticks out in an otherwise… Continue reading

From the Darkness: The Influence of German Expressionism on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

|Daniel McCabe| Strangers on a Train (1951) comes from the darkness, and not only because Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) shot the film in black and white. It draws influences from the German Expressionist films of the 1920s to create a foreboding mood while using the conventions… Continue reading

Fathers True and False in Conan the Barbarian

|Chris Ryba-Tures| “My fear is that my sons will never understand me,” says the Khitan General, his war council babbling all around him while the stone-faced barbarian, Conan, sits cross-legged on a table centered in their yurt. It feels like a throwaway line at first, a bit of conversational… Continue reading

The Lady Vanishes: Exploring Hitchcock’s Recurring Themes of Spies, Suspense, and the Wrongly Accused

| Dan Howard | The Lady Vanishes plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, April 4th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. For years, Alfred Hitchcock was simply a name and a face to me. Yes, he is one of the greatest directors of cinema, but his work had never resonated… Continue reading

Based on a True Story: Hitchcock Between Reality and Subjectivity

|Malcolm Cooke| At the start of The Wrong Man, a darkly silhouetted Alfred Hitchcock declares this film is different from all the ones he has made before: this story is true, and he intends to tell it with clinical accuracy. Hitchcock takes this task seriously, so seriously in fact that critic… Continue reading

Scoring the Past, Playing in the Present: A Tradition Continues with The Poor Nobodys & Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger at The Heights Theater

|Chris Polley| This was how it all began, really—music that’s performed, visuals that are projected, and never a word is uttered. Dating back to the first public presentation of the works of the Lumière brothers in Paris back in 1895, musical accompaniment to a film exhibition was performed… Continue reading

A Shaman’s Eyes: The Many Perspectives in the True Story of an Elusive Killer in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder

|Dan Howard| My first foray into Bong Joon-Ho’s unparalleled cinematic mind was at the very start of the COVID-19 shutdown. While confined to my home like everyone else, I took the opportunity to catch up on some movies I hadn’t seen, and Parasite was one of the first films… Continue reading

Slapstick for Paranoids

|Cole Seidl| Paranoia is mainstream again. Since September 11th, 2001, the American collective unconscious has been building towards a degree of paranoiac saturation unseen since the golden age of conspiratorial thinking in the 1970s. On September 16th, 2001, Susan Sontag published Continue reading