The Pleasure Garden

Centennial celebration of Hitchcock's debut film with live musical accompaniment and a Q&A

1925. 92 m. Alfred Hitchcock. BFI. US. Silent with English Intertitles with subtitles. Rated NR.

Series

Alfred Hitchcock made his cinematic debut exactly 100 years ago with The Pleasure Garden, a charming film that plants thematic and aesthetic markers for the legendary career to follow. The film is rarely screened in the United States and almost NEVER screened with a live accompaniment.

The JBFC celebrates Hitchcock’s artistic centennial with this rare screening of The Pleasure Garden, introduced by film historian (and Burns regular) Jeff Hughes, and followed by a Q&A with Hughes and Hitchcock Annual editor-in-chief Sidney Gottlieb. The Q&A will be open to ALL THINGS Hitchcock, but Gottlieb is the rare scholar to have studied and taught Pleasure Garden extensively. The conversation will keep going in Take 3 Wine Bar & Café after the Q&A.

Presented with Live Musical Accompaniment by Scott Ethier.

Tickets: $35 (members), $40 (nonmembers)

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“The opening scene of The Pleasure Garden seems almost like a clip reel of Hitchcock motifs to come… But in other, no less interesting ways, these films represent the road not taken. At this early point in his career, Hitchcock was still experimenting with different genres and different styles, varying his approach film by film as he discovered what he had to say and refined how he wanted to say it.”
Dave Kehr, The New York Times

PAST EVENTS

Q&A and Conversation with Hitchcock Scholars Sidney Gottlieb and Jeff Hughes

Sunday, Jun. 15 2025, 11:00

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Sidney Gottlieb is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT. His long-standing research and teaching interests are in literature and film studies. His publications include essays on numerous 17th-century writers, including George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, and a variety of filmmakers including Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. He is the editor of the Hitchcock Annual (Columbia University Press) and has edited two volumes of Hitchcock—On Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (University of California Press) and most recently co-edited Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock's Masterpiece Then and Now (John Libbey/Indiana University Press).
Jeff Hughes holds multiple degrees from the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, focusing his research on American political cinema, the movie musical and the films of Sidney Lumet. He is currently in the American Studies program at Rutgers-Newark. During his 20-year absence from academia, he authored four plays and two musicals, and founded Boardwalk Theatre Company, an organization dedicated to after-school education in underserved communities such as Asbury Park, NJ. He was the recipient of the 2009 Richard Rodgers Awards, administered by the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of DaBearsBlog.com, the nation's leading Chicago Bears website, which is celebrating its 20th season in 2025.