International Cinema Origins to 1960

Catalog description

This course surveys the major aesthetic movements and technological developments within international cinema from the birth of the art form until the 1960s. The course will approach films, from a variety of countries, as products of their time, as responses to technological developments, or as contributions to ongoing dialogues about the nature of cinema as an artistic medium. Later sections of the course, after the war and coming of sound, follow more traditional national cinema models. The course will also explore a wide variety of formats including short subjects, serials, and features as well as documentaries and experimental works. The course will introduce students to central texts and concepts of key aesthetic movements such as Expressionism, Surrealism, Poetic Realism, and Neorealism, movements that continued to influence filmmaking far beyond the course’s endpoint in the 1960s.