History of Film / Course # AH 390                                    
Spring 2008
Dr. David Sterritt
Class: Tuesdays 1-3:45 p.m. / Brown 320
Screenings: Mondays 7-9 p.m. / Falvey Hall
Office hours: by appointment, before and after class
djsterritt@aol.com

Course content:

This course explores the history of world cinema through the study of narrative and non-narrative works from the silent-film era to the present day. The areas to be explored include the prehistory of film; so-called primitive cinema; early instances of fiction and nonfiction cinema; the development of editing and narrative techniques; Soviet montage theory; German Expressionism; the transition from silent to sound cinema; auteur theory; international movements such as Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave; surrealist and avant-garde film; and queer cinema. Attention will be paid to economic and industrial as well as aesthetic and ideological aspects of film history. Filmmakers to be examined and discussed include Thomas Edison, Louis and Auguste Lumière, Georges Méliès, D.W. Griffith, Oscar Micheaux, Sergei Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Germaine Dulac, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes.

All students are required to attend the weekly Monday-night screenings as well as the Tuesday-afternoon class sessions. Attendance will be taken at both. Reading assignments will be distributed in class.

Assignments for weekly papers:
Each paper should be one page long, give or take a few lines, and typed. Papers are due in the first class after the assignment is given.
Don’t forget to keep up with your course journal, 2-3 pages for each week’s work

Course schedule:
(* indicates additional in-class screening)

Part 1: Introduction

Week 1 – Origins of cinema
1/21 Screening – (none)
          1/22 Class – The prehistory of film. Eadweard Muybridge and serial photography. Silent cinema. Music in the nickelodeon. Edison and the mutoscope; the Lumière brothers and projected film. *Thomas A. Edison films. *Louis and Auguste Lumière films.
Download this week's reading here.

Part 2: Silent film

Week 2 – Editing and storytelling
    1/28 Screening – D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, USA, 1915 (Part 1)
    1/29 Class – Rudimentary montage. Méliès and the beginnings of film narrative. Early film genres. Camera movement and visual style. *Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, France, 1902. *Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery, USA, 1903.
Download this week's reading here.

Assignment for January 29, due February 5
  
 Most critics regard the films of Georges Méliès as an artistic advancement over the works of such earlier filmmakers as the Thomas Edison studio and the Lumière brothers. Why do critics take this view?

Each paper should be one page long, give or take a few lines, and typed. Papers are due in the first class after the assignment is given.
Don’t forget to keep up with your course journal, 2-3 pages for each week’s work

Week 3 – Griffith, Micheaux, and representations of race in cinema
    2/4 Screening – D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, USA, 1915 (Part 2)
    2/5 Class –The first blockbuster. Racism and ideology. Art versus commerce in early film. The dawn of African-American cinema. *Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates, USA, 1920.
Download this week's reading here.

Assignment for February 5, due February 12

Does the artistic quality of D.W. Griffith's epic Birth of a Nation make the film worth viewing today, despite the racism of its subject matter? Or not?  State and briefly explain your opinion.

Week 4 – Sergei M. Eisenstein and Soviet montage theory
    2/11 Screening – Sergei M. Eisenstein, Strike, USSR, 1925.
    2/12 Class – Dialectical montage. Cinema as a revolutionary tool. History, ideology, and film technique. *Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin, USSR, 1925.

Week 5 – German Expressionism
    2/18 Screening – F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, Germany, 1922
    2/19 Class – Germany in the Weimer period. Expressionist style. Film and fantasy. From Caligari to Hitler. *Excerpts from Expressionist works.
    Download this week's reading here.

Part 3: Sound film

Week 6 – Sound cinema
    2/25 Screening – Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, USA, 1941
    2/26 Class – The studio system. Sound on disc, sound on film. Talkies take over. Welles, film artistry, and commercialism. *Alfred Hitchcock, Blackmail, UK, 1929 (excerpts).
    Download this week's reading here.

Part 4: International cinemas

Week 7 – Italian Neorealism
    3/3 Screening – Federico Fellini, La Strada, Italy, 1954.
3/4 Class – Italy in the post-World War II years. Realism versus “white telephone” films. Neorealist rules and guidelines. The decline of the Neorealist aesthetic. *Excerpts from Neorealist films.
Download this week's reading here.

Week 8 – The French New Wave
    3/10 Screening – François Truffaut, The 400 Blows, France, 1959.
    3/11 Class – Neorealist naturalism + eye-catching style = the French New Wave aesthetic. Overturning the “cinéma du papa.” The core Nouvelle Vague filmmakers: critics become directors. Auteur theory. New directions in cinematography. The wide-ranging influence of New Wave techniques. *Excerpts from New Wave films.

Assignment for February 26, due March 4

    Give a brief account of how and why world cinema made the transition from silent film to sound-film production in the late 1920s. 
Don’t forget to keep up with your course journal, 2-3 pages for each week’s work


Week 9 – Japanese cinema
    3/24 Screening – Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon, Japan, 1950.
    3/25 Class – The long tradition of Asian film. Kurosawa makes international waves and Western moviegoers finally take notice. Some key Japanese auteurs. Japanese aesthetics and Western influences in Kurosawa’s cinema. *Excerpts from Japanese films.

Part 4: Into the avant-garde

Assignment for March 25, due April 1
    Choose either Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa or Sisters of the Gion by Kenji Mizoguchi, and describe how some aspect(s) of its content and/or style seem to be rooted in Japanese traditions, as opposed to the Western filmmaking traditions we’ve focused on in the course until this point.

Don’t forget to keep up with your course journal, 2-3 pages for each week’s work

Week 10 – Surrealism, French Impressionism, Feminist Filmmaking
    3/31 Screening – Luis Buñuel, Viridiana, Mexico/Spain, 1961.
    4/1 Class – The surrealist aesthetic. Art and the unconscious. The challenges of putting surrealism on film. Buñuel and Lynch: old master, young rebel. *Germaine Dulac, France, The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928.

Week 11 – Avant-garde cinema
    4/7 Screening – Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, USA, 1982.
    4/8 Class – Nonnarrative film and the “cinema of attractions.” Personal filmmaking. Subversive cinema. Resisting the commercialization of cinema. Major trends and tendencies in experimental and “underground” film. *Avant-garde shorts.

Part 5: Case study – melodrama and history

Week 12 – Film melodrama of the 1950s
    4/14 Screening – Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows, USA, 1955.
    4/15 Class – The meaning of “melodrama.” Hollywood and the “woman’s picture.” Feminist criticism. Soap opera as social criticism. Subversive messages in mass-audience movies. *Excerpts from 1950s melodramas.

Assignment for April 15, due April 22
    Would you call Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a mere remake of Douglas Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows, or do you feel it transforms its source material in ways that make it relevant for the different time and place in which it was originally made and seen? Briefly explain your position.

Don’t forget to keep up with your course journal, 2-3 pages for each week’s work


Week 13 – Das Neue Kino
    4/21 Screening – Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fear Eats the Soul, West Germany, 1974.
    4/22 Class – Art film versus mainstream film. Core filmmakers of the New German Cinema group. Fassbinder + Sirk = drastic melodrama + extreme cinema. *Excerpts from Neue Kino films.

Week 14 – Queer cinema
    4/28 Screening – Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven, France/USA, 2002.
    4/29 Class – Gay identity in cinema. Hollywood and heterosexism. The enduring influence of Sirkian melodrama. *Todd Haynes, Dottie Gets Spanked, USA, 1993.


Course requirements:

   Students must attend all class sessions and screenings, complete all reading assignments in a timely way, and participate actively in class discussions.
   In addition, each student must complete a weekly paper and must keep a journal during the course, to be submitted on in class on April 29, the last day of the course. Guidelines for journals are given below.
   Final grades will not be calculated according to a rigid formula, but will take account of all work during the course – your weekly papers, your journal, and class participation.
   All written work must be typed.

Attendance and Participation:
   Attendance will be taken at the beginning of each class and each screening. It is your responsibility to get to class on time. Unexcused absences will result in a lower final grade. If you know you will be absent on a future date, let me know in advance. Absences will be excused only if you provide verification (documentation of a legitimate reason: illness, family emergency, etc.) as to why the class was missed. It is your responsibility to catch up with work missed due to absences, excused or otherwise. This includes all films that have been screened in class; if you miss a film, you need to watch it in your own time. (Most films will be available for viewing in the Media Resource Center after they have been screened in class.) You should participate fully in class discussions, since part of your final grade will reflect class participation.
   No late assignments will be accepted unless the lateness has been excused, and this requires verification (documentation of a legitimate reason: illness, family emergency, etc.) as to why the due date was missed.

Journal rules and guidelines:
         Every student must keep a course journal throughout the semester, to be turned in at the final class. It must contain two to three pages on each week’s subject matter, demonstrating knowledge of the pertinent films and filmmakers, material covered in class discussions, and material covered in the reading assignments. You are encouraged to view additional relevant films outside class and include references to them in your journal entries. This is not a diary – it is an academic journal, meant to record what you are learning and thinking with regard to the course on a weekly basis. You are welcome to include material suggested by reading and film viewing outside class, but the material must be relevant to this course.

Academic integrity:
   Academic integrity -- the pursuit of scholarly activity free from fraud and deception -- is an educational objective of this institution. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarism, fabrication of information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, submitting work of another person or submitting work previously used without informing the instructor, and tampering with the academic work of other students.
   A student charged with academic dishonesty will be given oral or written notice of the charge by the instructor. If students believe they have been falsely accused, they should seek redress through informal discussions with the instructor, department head, dean, or campus executive officer. If the instructor believes the infraction is sufficiently serious to warrant the referral of the case to the Office of Conduct Standards, or if the instructor decides to give a final grade of F in the course because of the infraction, the student and faculty will be afforded formal due-process procedures.

Suggested books to supplement the reading assignments:


Additional information

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is using someone else’s words or ideas without acknowledgment.  Submitting work containing plagiarism is grounds for failure of an assignment or failure of the course.  Repeat offenses will be brought to the attention of the department chair.  To be responsible when summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting, include a citation like:

*** I read in yesterday’s New York Times that…
*** As Simone de Beauvoir famously asserts: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (p. 34).
*** My roommate Pete noticed that…
*** If it’s common knowledge and your own idea, you do not need quotations. The yellow of the Lance Armstrong bracelet suggests bravery.

Document your citations in a bibliography or “works cited” page at the end of your paper and follow standard guidelines such as MLA or Chicago manual style.  Familiarize yourself with these guidelines in Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual, and always check with your instructor before turning in questionable work. You may also check on these and other language-related issues with one of the helpful tutors in the Writing Center, (410) 225-2418. The Writing Center has copies of the Hacker manual as well.

ADA COMPLIANCE: In MICA's efforts to provide the highest possible quality educational experience for every student, MICA maintains compliance with the requirements of the ADA and Section 504.  Any student who has, or suspects he or she may have, a disability and wants to request academic accommodations must contact the Director of the Learning Resource Center immediately.

The Director of the Learning Resource Center, Dr. Kathryn Smith, may be reached at 410 225-2416 or by email at ksmith@mica.edu.


MICA has developed policies and practices to ensure a healthful environment and safe approaches to the use of equipment, materials, and processes.  It is the mutual responsibility of faculty and students to review health and safety standards relevant to each class at the beginning of each semester.  Students should be aware of general fire, health, and safety regulations posted in each area and course specific polices, practices, and cautions.  Students who have concerns related to health and safety should contact the Environmental Health and Safety Coordinator.

The Environmental Health and Safety Coordinator, Quentin Moseley, may be reached at 410 225-0220 or by email at qmosele@mica.edu.