From UFA to Psycho was prepared as a non-synchronous film class for students at Westchester Community College. The term is used to describe a pre-packaged class the students can watch whenever they choose. I put it together during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic when all my classes went to absolute shit. Teachers had no idea what to do; we had to improvise. Ultimately I had to rewrite the entire semester into a succinct combination of improvised speech, hundreds of clips and photos, and the inevitable bullet points. It worked; I'm still using this approach in-person and online.

What did not work was the non-synchronous stuff. Students don't engage with teachers who aren't there. Interaction with the class is not possible; teachers need that live audience. Teaching's like stand-up comedy: you know right away when you're bombing. You change direction. I abandoned non-synchronicity after two lessons.

Nonetheless, I still like the lesson contained in this video. Think of it as a slim documentary introduction to Hitchcock. It ended up being about eighty minutes, too long for students but perhaps OK for a more casual audience. I ended with Psycho because that was the film I was showing them that week.

In the literature on Psycho a consistent sore point is the psychiatrist's description of Norman's mental state at the end of the movie. Some regard it as a major flaw in the film. I don't agree, but I've had the advantage of working with a lot of test audiences. Students like it; they want the explanation. They feel it solves all the puzzles set up by the trick ending.

It's still an interesting thought experiment to see how the scene would play if most of the windy explantion was eliminated. Here is my shortened edit of the scene.

This video examines how much time Hitchcock spent manipulating the audience into believing the film was about Marion's theft. Spoiler—it wasn't.

The video is a short introduction to the mis-en-scène of Psycho. We cineastes use the term to describe most aspects of the production design.