Current and Upcoming Courses:

May
Akira Kurosawa: East Meets West

June
Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years

July
Symphony of Horrors:
Dracula in Literature and Film

September
The Language of Film
Now you can take this class at BMFI or
in Center City at The Gershman Y!

September - December
Film History Discussion Series:
1945-Present

Remember: BMFI Members at the Producer level and above receive a discount on course tuition.
Click here to join!

June
Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years
Taught by Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., Director of Education, BMFI

Class Meets: Wednesdays, June 4, 11, 18, 25, 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Fee: $100. To register, click here or call 610-527-4008 x105.

Alfred Hitchcock did not simply emerge from the primordial cinematic ooze a fully-formed filmmaker, in the mid-1950s, to create classics like Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Indeed, by that time Hitch had been directing pictures in Europe and the U.S. for nearly thirty years, over the course of which he developed his signature style and formulated his thematic approach to filmmaking.

While this class does not venture all the way back to Hitchcock’s German films of the 1920s, it does cover some of the director’s better known British work, such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as his initial forays into Hollywood. These include his very first (and nearly his last) American film, Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941), both of which star Joan Fontaine as a young wife who gets more than she bargained for after marrying Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant, respectively.

These early pictures contain some of the elements for which Hitch would later become famous: (blonde) women in trouble, danger in everyday places, Machiavellian matrons, and of course, his iconic cameos—despite being made by the Master of Suspense when he was but a craftsman.

Rebecca (1940)

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