FA 256 Understanding Movies: Great Film Directors

Lecture Hours: 2
Lab Hours: 2
Credits: 4

Features critical analysis and appreciation of cinema through the viewing and study of films that broke with tradition. Highlights the films of one artist, group style, or national cinema movement seen as an innovation in film history. Explores individual films as the work of an author or authors, especially within the context of viewing the films as a body of work embodying a unique world view and artistic practice. Also introduces basic cinematic terminology and concepts, film criticism, and the conventions of writing film analysis. Includes a weekly film screening lab that accompanies the lecture.

Prerequisite: Placement into WR 115; or completion of WR 090 with a grade of C or better; or consent of instructor.
Repeatable: 2

Student Learning Outcomes:

Identify and explain the significance of the relationship between film art and society.
Identify and define the forms, stylistic devices, and technologies used by innovative film artists across their body of work or in innovative group styles or national cinema movements in their historical contexts.
Identify and analyze critical approaches and cultural contexts related to concepts of film authorship.
Critically examine issues of diversity and inclusion in relation to film, society, and authorship. Write critical analyses of films including at least one essay in MLA format with documentation.

Statewide General Education Outcomes:

Interpret and engage in the Arts and Letters, making use of the creative process to enrich the quality of life.
Critically analyze values and ethics within a range of human experience and expression to engage more fully in local and global issues.

Content Outline

Convention vs. Innovation
- Industrial background, codified practices, marketing and product differentiation
  - Independent cinema
- Technological constraints
- Historical and contemporary influences
  - Hollywood’s response to art cinema
- Contact with other filmmaking cultures
- Minority voices, resistance to mainstream commercial cinema
Critical Approaches to Film Authorship
- Individual style
  - The auteur theory, focus on director as true artist of a film
    - Establishment of film as legitimate art form
    - Western notions of individual, Romanticism
  - Author vs. auteur, screenwriter vs. director
  - Role of producer and/or studio, the genius of the system
    - Thomas Schatz, Andre Bazin
  - Stable team of collaborators
  - Role of stars
  - Historical emergence of theiry
    - European origins: Alexandre Astruc, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Lac Goddard, Bazin, and Cahier du Cinema
    - Cultural conditions: Post World War II influx of American films into France
    - Andrew Sarris, mistranslation of la politique des auteurs, xenophobia and racism
  - Artistic motivation and the classical Hollywood cinema
  - Author as effect of the text, historical conditions of both writing and reading
    - Roland Barthes
- Group styles
  - Studios
  - Craft traditions
  - Historical movements (e.g., German Expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Bollywood, Hong Kong, Cinema Novo, Nigerian Video Film, New Hollywood, Taiwanese New Wave, South Korean New Wave or horror)
- National cinemas
  - Concept of nation in relation to mass media
    - Benedict Anderson and imagined communities
  - Industrial history
  - Evolution of nation’s cinema
  - Relationship to Hollywood and cultural colonialism
    - Quota systems
  - Ideological and cultural resistance (e.g., Soviet Montage, Third Cinema)
- Relationship to genre and genre filmmakers
  - Genre “auteurs” (e.g., John Ford, Howard Hawks)
Cinematic Technique
- Innovations in form and style
  - Specific formal or stylistic movements (e.g., the “aesthetics of hunger”)
- Form
  - Avant garde/experimental filmmaking
  - Distribution and exhibition contexts
  - Documentary filmmaking
  - Narrative
- Cinematography
- Mise-en-scene
- Editing style
- Sound
Innovation and Break With Tradition
- Artistic vision and break with tradition
  - Consistency and variation of vision
  - Recurring formal elements and stylistic differences
  - Evolution of vision and style across the oeuvre, group, or movement
- Personal expression in film
  - Relationship to video art
- Cinematic and cultural influences upon the director
- Influence of the innovation on later film movements
Lecture, lab/screening
- Lab
  - Introductory lecture
  - Film screening
- Lecture
  - Secondary Lecture
  - Assignment