The History and Aesthetics of Film

Catalog description

This course will provide both a detailed survey of the history of moving-image arts and an introduction to key aesthetic and theoretical concepts in the study of film. We will study the major elements of film form—editing, cinematography, sound, mise-en-scène—as phenomena emerging from specific historical contexts and chart their development both over time and as they travel around the world. While the emphasis in the earlier part of the course will be on film’s European and American origins, we will approach film as a truly global phenomenon with considerable attention devoted to East Asian and South Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cinemas. While the basic course structure will be chronological, we will develop the vocabulary and viewing skills necessary to identify and analyze the key components of film texts; for example, our examination of editing will be situated within our discussion of 1920s American and Soviet cinema, while possible uses and aesthetic implications of sound will be examined alongside a number of diverse early experiments with sound. Other key moments studied will include the development of “classical” Hollywood cinema (and challenges to it), the emergence of new national art cinemas in the post-World War II era, the radical cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and developments in film aesthetics since the introduction of digital filmmaking techniques in the 1990s. Key theoretical approaches in film studies will also be situated in their historical context, including early debates around film’s status as art from the 1910s and 1920s, inquiries into the relationship between photography and reality from the post-World War II period, and different critical approaches to the analysis of the ideological implications of film and its relationship to the spectator. THE CURRICULUM 60 Feminist Film and Media History