Introduction to the Study and Theory of Film
Film S3001 / section 001
Summer 2008
Monday/Wednesday 1:20-5:10
Dr. David Sterritt
djsterritt@aol.com / www.DavidSterritt.com
Class schedule
The
reading assignments given here are from the required books listed
below. Additional reading may be assigned in class. The films listed
here are subject to change, and additional film material may be
screened in class.
Class 1 – May 28
Topic: Early cinema
Lecture: The prehistory of film. Magic lanterns, serial photography and
chronophotography, ingenious gizmos. Origins of film
technology and film culture. Issues in film historiography.
Narrative and documentary.
Screening: Short films by Thomas Edison, Louis and Auguste Lumière,
Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, and Alice Guy-Blaché.
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 1-21
Hugo Münsterberg, “The Means of the Photoplay,” in Braudy &
Cohen, 411-417
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and
the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Braudy & Cohen, 862-876
Class 2 – May 30
Topic: Silent film and the maturing of film narrative
Lecture: Narrative in silent cinema. Origins of the Hollywood studio
system. Film and ideology.
Screening: Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, D.W.
Griffith, USA, 1919
The Lonedale Operator, D.W. Griffith, USA, 1911
For His Son, D.W. Griffith, USA, 1912
Excerpts from The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, USA, 1915)
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 22-49
Tom Gunning, “Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System,”
in Braudy & Cohen, 470-481
Class 3 – June 2
Topic: Soviet montage theory
Lecture: History + Theory = Dialectical Montage. The Kuleshov effect.
Is editing the essence of cinema? Realism. The collective
hero. Film as an ideological instrument. Socialist film vs.
capitalist film.
Screening: Stachka [Strike], Sergei M. Eisenstein, USSR, 1925
Excerpts from Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, USSR, 1925); The
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, USSR, 1929); Psycho
(Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960); The Untouchables (De Palma,
USA, 1987)
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 70-78
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves,” in Braudy
& Cohen, 436-444
Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot,” in Braudy & Cohen, 13-
23
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” in Braudy
& Cohen, 23-40
Vsevolod Pudovkin, “On Editing,” in Braudy & Cohen, 7-12
Class 4 – June 4
Topic: German Expressionism and the pleasures of terror
Lecture: The Romantic Movement and film. Mise-en-scène rules! The
anti-realist aesthetic.
Screening: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett [Waxworks], Leo Birinsky and
Paul Leni, Germany, 1924
Excerpts from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene,
Germany, 1920); Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror
(Murnau, Germany, 1922)
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 78-85
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” in Braudy
& Cohen, 154-165
Class 5 – June 9
Topic: You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet! The transition to sound and the
consolidation of the classical film style
Lecture: Film and technology. Issues in sound-film theory and
aesthetics. Hollywood hegemony and the classical narrative
style. Art vs. commerce in the American film industry.
The advent of color films. Cinema censorship looms.
Screening: The Front Page, Lewis Milestone, USA, 1931
Excerpts from Blackmail (Hitchcock, UK, 1929)
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 50-52, 89-108, 112-136
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori
Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in Braudy & Cohen,
370-372
Class 6 – June 11
Topic: Challenges to the classical film style in the post-World War II era.
Lecture: Genre. Film noir. Deep focus and the long take. The high price
of bucking the Hollywood system.
Screening: Touch of Evil, Orson Welles, USA, 1958
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 108-112
André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 41-53
Class 7 – June 16
Topic: Italian neorealism
Lecture: History + Theory = Neorealist Cinema. Bazin and realist theory
vs. Eisenstein and formatiev theory. Mise-en-scène rules
again!
Screening: Germania anno zero [Germany Year Zero], (Roberto
Rossellini, Italy, 1948)
Excerpts from additional Italian Neorealist films
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 168-171
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 166-170
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in Braudy & Cohen,
170-173
Class 8 – June 18
Topic: Auteurism and authorship in film
Lecture: Auteur theory. Film as personal expression vs. the genius of the
system. Adaptation and interpretation.
Screening: Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis [Masculine, Feminine: In 15
Acts], Jean-Luc Godard, France/Sweden, 1966
Jean-Luc Godard: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma, Gidion
Phillips, USA, 2008
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 187-189
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 561-564
Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 525-533
Class 9 – June 23
Topic: Psychological theories of cinema
Lecture: Freud, Lacan, Žižek. Psychoanalysis vs. cognitive theory – is
film spectatorship a journey to the unconscious or an
exercise in problem solving?
Screening: Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 199-200
Christian Metz, “Identification, Mirror,” in Braudy & Cohen,
820-836
Tania Modleski, “The Master’s Dollhouse: Rear Window,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 849-861
Class 10 – June 25
Topic: Film and feminist theory
Lecture: The gaze, the three looks, and cinema’s patriarchal bias. Films
and fetishes. Do movie cameras have a gender?
Screening: Wanda, Barbara Loden, USA, 1970
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 293-299, 366-368
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in
Braudy & Cohen, 837-848
Class 11 – June 30
Topic: Film theory and philosophy
Lecture: Deleuze and film theory. Chronometric time vs. durational time.
The movement-image and the time-image. The sensory-motor
system. The actual and the virtual. Opsigns and sonsigns. The
crystal-image. Peaks of present, peaks of past. Schizoanalysis
vs. psychoanalysis.
Screening: L’Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad], Alain
Resnais, France, 1961
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 248-249
Gilles Deleuze, “The Origin of the Crisis: Italian Neo-Realism
and the French New Wave,” in Braudy & Cohen, 242-250
Gilles Deleuze, “Beyond the Movement-Image,” in Braudy &
Cohen, 250-269
Class 12 – July 2
Topic: Avant-garde cinema
Lecture: The poetics of cinema. Nonnarrative and experimental film.
Surrealist film, lyrical film, structural film. Photographed
film and hand-painted film. Found footage films -- movies
without movie cameras.
Screening: Un Chien andalou, Luis Buñuel, 1929
Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren and Alexander
Hammid, USA, 1943
Fireworks, Kenneth Anger, USA, 1947
Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1963
Eye Myth, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972
The Wold Shadow, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972
The Dante Quartet, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1987
I…Dreaming, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1988
A Movie, Bruce Conner, USA, 1958
Mongoloid, Bruce Conner, USA, 1978
Passage à l’acte, Martin Arnold, Austria, 1993
Reading: Dixon & Foster, 55-63, 283-287
Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,”
in Braudy & Cohen, 187-198
Stan Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision, in Braudy &
Cohen, 199-205
Required books:
1. Wheeler Winston Dixon & Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, A Short History of Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
2.
Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, sixth edition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
These books are available at the Columbia
University Bookstore, and should be easy to find in other bookstores
and from online booksellers.
Writing assignments:
Weekly
papers will be assigned in class. Note that grading of these papers
will take account of communication skills – clarity, grammar, spelling,
punctuation – as well as knowledge of the subject matter.
In
addition, every student must maintain a course journal to be submitted
at the end of the course; the exact date will be given as the time
approaches. Your journal should contain 2 to 3 pages on every class
session, giving your responses to the material covered – the assigned
reading, the films viewed, the topics lectured on and discussed in
class. The writing in your journal can be more informal than that in
the weekly papers, but clarity of expression is very important.
Attendance:
In
keeping with Film Division policy, attendance is mandatory; unexcused
absences may result in a significantly lowered grade. Incompletes
cannot be given except in case of a documented emergency.