2008–2009 Film History Courses
The Aesthetics and History of Film
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
This course is designed to introduce students to the art of film and its rich history. In the first semester, we will examine film’s basic aesthetic features: its stylistic techniques, such as editing, cinematography, and sound, as well as its narrative and nonnarrative forms. Anyone who wishes to study film must first be able to identify these aesthetic features and the variety of ways they shape our experience of films. In the second semester, we will turn our attention to film history, looking at the major films, filmmakers, and film movements from the birth of cinema until the present day. The course will heighten students’ aesthetic appreciation of any film by enabling them to notice and evaluate the creative choices made by filmmakers of all varieties. We will meet twice a week; in addition, there will be two separate, mandatory screenings per week.
Melodrama in the Movies
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
What is the difference between tragedy and melodrama? “If you don’t like it, it’s melodrama,” a Sarah Lawrence professor once quipped. In this course, we will attempt to overcome the prejudice against melodrama. It is a prejudice against emotion, against tears, though tragedy also stirs our emotions and elicits our tears. It is a snobbish prejudice against popular art, though Greek and Elizabethan tragedies were popular in their time. It is a male prejudice against a genre often disparaged as a tearjerker for women, though men are equally susceptible to sentiment. Feminist film scholars have devoted much attention to melodrama. Our study of melodrama in the movies will be an inquiry into what moves us and the ways in which it moves us, men and women alike. Melodrama is commonly deemed too simple and sentimental, a genre that too easily draws the line between virtue and vice, between the good guys and the bad guys. But we will see that melodrama, like tragedy, is capable of nuance and moral complexity as well as strong emotion. Tragedy was traditionally about the high and mighty, the fall of kings; melodrama deals with the misfortunes of ordinary people, who traditionally were the province of comedy. And if, like tragedy, melodrama tells sad stories, it often enough, like comedy, arrives at happy endings. We will consider melodrama in relation not only to tragedy but also to comedy. It is a modern genre that emerged after the French Revolution and flourished in the theatre and novel of the nineteenth century. It has been a major genre in the cinema from the silent era until today, a staple of Hollywood old and new and abundant elsewhere in the world. Like any other genre, it has produced many lesser works but also its share of superior achievements. We will look at melodramas from different periods and countries and by several notable filmmakers. We will examine the nature of the genre and explore its various manifestations, their form and meaning, their transaction with the audience, their aesthetic appeal, and their social significance.
History of Experimental Film
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
For the first time in the 1920’s, film came to be widely accepted as an artistic medium. The result was an outpouring of creativity. Filmmakers and artists in the United States, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union experimented with film in a number of exciting ways, often producing theory and criticism in tandem with their cinematic experiments. Artists working primarily in other media, such as Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp, as well as filmmakers belonging to cross-media avant-garde movements, such as Dada and Surrealism, made some of the most enduring avant-garde films of all time. Meanwhile, documentary filmmakers experimented with novel forms of documentary, including the city film and Surrealist ethnography. In the first semester, we will examine in depth all of these considerable achievements. In the second, we will turn our attention to experimental film in the United States following World War II, observing how filmmakers updated prewar experimental genres such as the abstract film and the “psychodrama” associated with Surrealism, and how they pioneered new genres in the 1950’s, such as the lyrical film. We will then turn our attention to the so-called Structural film of the late 1960’s/1970’s and the reengagement with narrative at the end of the 1970’s, and the pluralism that has existed in experimental film since. Throughout, we will pay attention to the historical conditions that gave rise to these experiments and will read the theories behind them. This class will meet once a week; in addition, there will be two separate, mandatory screenings per week.
Open to juniors and above.
Reflexivity in the Movies
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
The dictionary defines “reflexive” as “directed or turned back on itself.” A movie is reflexive when it calls attention to itself as a movie, when it makes its own artifice manifest to the audience. This does not necessarily entail an exclusive preoccupation with film itself, only an acknowledgment of the means and the medium being employed, bringing on an awareness that it is a movie we are watching, a representation rather than a reality. Such artistic self-consciousness is characteristic of modernism, postmodernism, the avant-garde, and in this course we will study the work of several filmmakers who can be seen to exemplify these tendencies (Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Ernie Gehr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, to name a few). It is a mistake, however, to assume that reflexivity is always subversive in the avant-garde manner, always a break with convention and a challenge to reigning assumptions. Other kinds of art besides the modernistic or experimental draw attention to artifice. Comedy, for example, has had since antiquity a tradition of declaring its contrivance, making the audience smilingly aware that in real life things would not happen in this way. And a popular artist like Alfred Hitchcock regularly shows his hand, lets the audience know that he is behind the images we are watching on the screen (“for me, the cinema is not a slice of life,” he once said, “but a slice of cake”). Reflexivity even enters into the popular Americana of that Christmas classic, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which begins in heaven with an angel being briefed on the hero’s life in the form of a movie within the movie—there is even a freeze-frame at one point—and which comes to a happy ending manifestly contrived beyond the bounds of plausibility. Along with modernism and the avant-garde, we will consider various other ways in which reflexivity informs our experience of films. In this connection, we will examine the work of such filmmakers as Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Douglas Sirk, Federico Fellini, and Pedro Almodóvar.