Unless you are shown around, the history of cinema can be a bit overwhelming. There’s a lot of films to watch and it’s not so easy, these days, to figure out how the history of cinema developed across the last 100 years.

My advice is always to begin with Alfred Hitchcock…

Hitchcock was a British film director who began his career in the 1920s, when films were silent, and continued unto the early 1970s. That’s a fifty year career, and with stages in Britain, Germany and the USA.

Hitchcock made almost a film every year throughout his career as a director. These are the important ones…

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Frenzy (1972)

Because of his early experience in Germany, Hitchcock was amongst the first directors to understand the freudian significance of feeling intrinsic to the voyeurism of watching films. The rich psychological and formal content of Hitchcock films have made them a staple of film studies courses and there is an enormous industry in Hitchcock interpretation.

The famous interviews wth Francois Truffaut also revealed Hitchcock as a director with a clear sense of a reflective and critical practice, and with a great sense of style. The male and female protagonists in Hitchcock films are amongst the best-dressed in film history.