Suspense makes us wait for something. Many films elide or reshape time to help us anticipate what happens, but the suspense film focuses even more on when it happens. The film is structured around a future event that depends upon an interval. This unsettled, suspended time points toward time itself, and to our own time as we, necessarily, wait for it to end. In this course we will study a range of films that seem to use this form of unsettled time. These works might include thrillers, mysteries and horror films, but also films about dancing, dreaming, and waiting by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, Luis Buñuel, Agnès Varda, Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Kent, Mary Harron, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Jean-Pierre Melville.
