What is this?
A Year in Suspense is a nearly year-long retrospective on the work of Alfred Hitchcock for an informal movie club I formed during quarantine.
How often is it?
Each week, I send a newsletter with a capsule review preceding our Sunday night viewings.
Hitchcock directed 53 features, one of which is still lost. We’ll be watching approximately 35 of them.
Do we need another critical evaluation of Hitchcock?
We do not.
I’m mindful of the infinite choices available to us and that the oeuvre I settled on is unlikely to add to the current dialogue about what the film canon could - and should - evolve to represent.
There’s also the contentious subject of his attitude toward women, both on-screen and off (which I plan to get into). It’s thorny for sure.
So, why did you pick Hitchcock?
I have an ulterior motive in rewatching these films for a creative project I won’t get into, but I primarily chose them because I wanted to find another year-long series that was both entertaining had an easy entry-point for the uninitiated. These are movies made with the audience in mind. Movies where the form isn’t sacrificed for content – rather, form makes the content.
I know these movies pretty well, having seen many at a young age and studied the remainder in college. Many are among my favorites and account for what fostered a love for movies to begin with. And in revisiting, I hope to not shy away from writing (or finding writing) about these movies’ thorny ideas about sex, gender, race, class, and morality – and what they may have said about the man who made them.
I have complicated feelings about it. This subject’s not for everyone. But it is for me.
Why Substack?
Given the previous movie club newsletters were shared rather haphazardly, I wanted to give my friends the chance to opt-in by choosing to subscribe, rather than have to reply to and face me directly. It also seemed like an easier way to invite new readers along for the ride.
Would you consider submissions from guest writers?
Sure, feel free to DM me @andreweaton.bsky.social.
I should mention, though, that I don’t plan on putting any part of this newsletter behind a paywall. That’s because I remain fabulously wealthy from the windfall I received from starting and quickly selling the company Juicero, and not at all because I pay every cent I earn to the creditors of my student loans.
I hope you look forward to watching these as much as I do, be they for the first time or the tenth.
See you at the movies.
