I took a university course called “Film as Art” not one Hitchcock film was reviewed. What constitutes art is far to subjective for me to draw such a stark distinction, but to each his own. No offense take BTW.
I knew that would get a reaction. I may have worded it poorly too. I suppose what I meant by film as an art-form is film as what the French called "pure cimema", whereby the use of the technical aspects of film are used to convey the message. So delete script/story, acting etc, and just look at shot composition, editing, camera movement, etc. In that strict sense, Hitchcock may be peerless, so I would say that if one didn't appreciate his work from that point, one doesn't appreciate "pure cinema". There is of course other ways to look at film, I'm just speaking of one.
Psycho would be a great example of pure cinema. The story is rather mundane, the acting average, screenplay adequate, but the movie is considered one the greatest of all time, because the technical aspects are so brilliant. You could easily do an entire film course on that one movie.
This thread really got hi-jacked from it's original topic. oops.
Now, to allow people to throw stones at me, I say the following: I love music, can't stand The Beatles.
