International Cinema: Origins to 1960

Catalog description

This course surveys one period in the history of international cinema, taking as its starting point the transition to sound from 1930 to 1945 and accompanying thematic and stylistic developments in key markets in Eastern and Western Europe and Asia. The intersection of film style, subject matter, and subjectivity will inform this course, especially our study of the history of film after World War II, which will address Italian Neorealism as well as the cinemas of China, India and Japan and the development of a transnational critical framework and distribution network, the international art-cinema. Our discussions will be guided by primary texts, including Cesare Zavattini’s manifesto for Italian cinema, “Some Ideas on the Cinema” and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s essay on Japanese aesthetics, “In Praise of Shadows,” and grounded in our screenings of films by, among others, Clair, Renoir, Visconti, Vigo, Dreyer, Lang, Eisenstein, Kapoor, Ray, Naruse, Kurosawa and Antonioni. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors.