The Art of the Cinema

Catalog description

COMM 150Q The Art of the Cinema (3) (GA) This course takes a critical and historical approach to cinema, exploring relationships between classical and contemporary films and society and culture. It stresses critical thinking, analytical viewing, and essay writing (rather than memorization of facts or aesthetic evaluation of movies). COMM 150Q assumes that the cinema reveals, both directly and indirectly, something about collective experience, identity, and culture, and that movies can be analyzed-even psychoanalyzed-to reveal something about the cultural conditions that produced them and attracted audiences to them. The course seeks both to familiarize students with works they probably haven't seen and to "defamiliarize," through critical and historical analysis, works they very well may have seen. Students will examine movies as formal constructs, market commodities, and cultural artifacts-as reflections, however distorted, of society in the twentieth and twenty-first century.