HitchCon 2021: A look back.
What’s It All about, Alfie? Alfred Hitchcock’s Lessons in Love
What can Hitchcock’s films can teach us about love and life and love? 21 speakers from Canada, England and the United States gathered October 1-3, 2021, to share their insights! Watch each sessions’ videos. Scroll down and learn more about the world-class lineup.
Alfred Hitchcock: Master of… the heart?
Sure, Hitchcock’s name is synonymous with suspense. Yet, curiously, in film after film, love’s travails invariably follow his protagonists along their onscreen adventures. A Hitchcockian odyssey is not only about resolving physical, political or legal entanglements, but whether their quest also contributes to emotional growth.
In Notorious, will Devlin overcome his stubborn pride and trust issues to allow his love for Alicia to flourish? Likewise, can Marnie, in that 1964 film, escape her guilt complex and accept Mark’s help to move on? Will she learn to love?
Steeped as the director’s films are in romantic convention, the notion of “happily-ever-after” nevertheless remains all too elusive. The boy may get the girl—but their future after the final fade-to-black can be anybody’s guess. Over the decades, that ambiguity has fueled countless post-movie “icebox conversations.”
Grounded in scholarly rigor, this conference picks up on that dialogic tradition to focus on the ways in which Hitchcock teaches us how to love and improve our personal relationships. We invite you to join this conference with the promise that you’ll leave with your head filled with new ideas and a heart ready to embrace a more fulfilling, richer life.
HitchCon ‘21 Speakers
For Elizabeth Bullock, movies are a “gateway drug” to a life of the mind. She is a cinema, art history and humanities instructor at the City Colleges of Chicago and at Dominican University, River Forest. Bullock earned her Humanities M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Cinema and Media Studies program. Her publications include: “Naughts and Crosses: Marital and Cinematic Gamesmanship in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith” in Hitchcock Annual (2021), “Imaginary Women in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman” in Vertigo 65 (forthcoming 2025) edited by Daniel Varndell, and “More Blessed To Give: Tracking the Reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)” in a forthcoming compilation edited by Robert Kapsis.
Steven’s approach to his work is rooted in the belief that every story reveals deeper truths about the human condition. His passion lies in uncovering these truths and inspiring others to see the world more reflectively. He is the author of Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. Steven has appeared on-screen in the documentaries Viaggio nel Cinema in 3D: Una Storia Vintage and The Master's Touch: Hitchcock's Signature Style; and in featurettes on the 4K/UHD releases of To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He teaches cinema studies and screenwriting at Mercy University in Westchester County, New York, where he also coordinates their long-running International Film Festival.
Sidney Gottlieb is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut. He edits The Hitchcock Annual. His work on Hitchcock includes two volumes of Hitchcock on Hitchcock (1995 and 2015), Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews (2003) and, most recently, in collaboration with Donal Martin as co-editor, Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now (2021).
Joel Gunz believes that the search for meaning is among the highest of human pursuits, and it’s this impulse that drives his work. He’s a writer, filmmaker, host of the annual HitchCon International Alfred Hitchcock Conference and publisher of The Hitchcockian Quarterly. His recent publications include “Travels in Hitchcock’s Multiverse” (Re-viewing Hitchcock: New Critical Perspectives, Robert Kapsis, ed., forthcoming 2025) and “A Comparative Look at Hitchcock’s Murder! and Mary” (Hitchcock Annual, 2025, Sidney Gottlieb, ed.). His 2021 film essay Spellbound by L’Amour Fou was selected by several festivals and won Best Short Documentary at the Medusa Film Festival. He also hosts the salon-like MacGuffin Film Club, which features online film screenings followed by meaningful group discussions.
Elisabeth Karlin revels in the art of the movies and the life of the theater. She is an award-winning playwright who sometimes scribbles about film. Her plays have been seen on stages in New York and Los Angeles and have been published by Next Stage Press and Smith and Kraus. Her writing on Alfred Hitchcock includes Beyond the Blonde: The Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock and Lamb to the Slaughter for the Hitchcock Annual; Things Left Undone: Crimes of Passivity in Vertigo for the Vertigo 65 Conference in Dublin. She has also been a frequent contributor to HitchCon and to The Alfred Hitchcock Geek blog on a wide range of themes inspired by The Master.
Says Walter Raubicheck, “I love to watch, think about, talk about, and write about movies! And I find the greatest satisfaction doing those things about Hitchcock's films.” Walter is professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is the co-author with Walter Srebnick of Scripting Hitchcock (2011) and co-editor, with Srebnick, of Hitchcock’s Re-released Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991). More recently, he edited Hitchcock and the Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films, 1956-1969. A playwright, he debuted The New Norman, a play about the making of Psycho, at HitchCon ‘22. In addition to his work on Hitchcock, he has published essays on twentieth-century authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Dashiell Hammett and G. K. Chesterton.
