Lecture Date: January 15, 2015
For many years before his death in 1980, Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous filmmaker in the world. The millions of moviegoers who delighted in having their nerves shredded by The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and dozens of other thrillers were joined by an even larger audience who knew Hitchcock from his ghoulishly witty introductions to weekly segments of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Despite his undoubted fame and his mastery in regaling interviewers with carefully chosen anecdotes, however, Hitchcock revealed very little about himself besides these obligatory anecdotes to his colleagues, his friends, and his fans. Once he arrived in Hollywood, the publicity capital of the universe, he guarded his privacy jealously and remained at once notoriously well-known and notoriously unknown. This talk will explore the Alfred Hitchcock mystery: the relation between the public and private Hitchcock’s, the man who defined the Hollywood thriller and the man who was too fearful to learn to drive, the figure whose self-drawn eight-line silhouette was familiar to everyone who went to the movies and the poker-faced citizen who lived in the blanks between those lines.
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Thomas Leitch
Thomas Leitch has never lived more than ten miles from Interstate 95. After growing up in suburban New Jersey, he took a B.A. at Columbia University and a Ph.D. at Yale University before coming to the University of Delaware in 1983 to direct the Film Studies program. Since his arrival at Delaware, he has taught more briefly at Thomas Masaryk University in Brno and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to writing some 5000 book reviews for Kirkus Reviews, where he is Mystery Editor, he has published books on narrative theory, crime films, film adaptation, Perry Mason, and his old teacher Lionel Trilling. Every time he thinks he has given up writing about Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense pulls him back in to write Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games or The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock or, with Leland Poague, to co-edit A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. His most recent book is Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age.