Chuck Tryon has a tentative syllabus for his Intro to Film class up on his blog. It’s been a few years since I’ve taught, but it made me wonder how I’d structure an Intro class, and drafting a syllabus is not an entirely hypothetical requirement now that I’m putting an eye to the job market. So my stab follows, below the fold. It’s more an “Intro to Film Studies” than an “Intro to Film” syllabus, the emphasis being on a pithy introduction to the theoretical and historical discipline than in appreciating film as an art. Though of course one always needs to introduce students to the film canon - across genre, nation, and era - if they’re going to make sense of the scholarship or indeed take study of cinema seriously.
Unlike Chuck, I don’t have to fight with the army I had. In particular, after teaching at Brown, where double features are the norm in film classes, I’d find it painful to go back to one film-a-week screenings. And I’ll assume film rental budget is no object. It may err on the too theoretical side for beginning students - there just isn’t a great, accessible intro textbook that I’ve found. Is that proof positive that film studies hasn’t matured as a discipline?
Intro to Film Studies Syllabus
films, then readings for each week
1. Intro: Experience of Cinema
Lumiere and early cinema (LOC) shorts
Zorn’s Lemma (Hollis Frampton)
Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen)
Siegfried Kracauer, “Basic Concepts” from Theory of Film
2. Form: Mise-en-Scene and Cinematography
Melies shorts
Tale of Late Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)
Bordwell/Thompson, Film Art, ch. 1,6,7
Andre Bazin, “Ontology”, “Myth of Total Cinema” from What is Cinema?
3. Form: Editing (Continuity and its alternatives)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
October (Sergei Eisenstein)
Three-Way Mirror (Jean Epstein)
Chuck Jones or I. Freiling short
Bordwell/Thompson, ch. 8
Sergei Eisenstein, “Cinematographic Practice and the Ideogram”
Raymond Bellour, “Obvious and the Code”
Dmytryk on Editing, excerpt
4. Form: Sound in Fiction and Documentary
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson)
NBC White Paper: “Sit In”
Eyes on the Prize, v. 3
Bordwell, ch. 9
5. Narration: The Realist Text and Point of View
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery)
Klute (Alan Pakula)
Colin MacCabe, “Notes on Realism”
Pascal Bonitzer, “Partial Visions: Film and the Labrynth”
Christine Gledhill, “Klute”
6. Narration: Spectatorship
Stagecoach (John Ford)
Gilda (Charles Vidor)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren)
Nick Browne, “Spectator-in-the-Text: Rhetoric of Stagecoach”
Christian Metz, “Story/Discourse, Two Kinds of Voyeurism”
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
7. Industry: Genre
Lone Ranger serials
Scarface (Howard Hawks)
House of Laughing Windows (Avati Pupi)
Thomas Schatz, “Film Genres and the Genre Film”
Edward Mitchell, “Apes and Essences”
Carol Clover, excerpt from Men Women and Chainsaws.
8. Industry: Stars
Niagara (Henry Hathaway)
Show Boat (James Whale)
Richard Dyer, excerpts from Stars and Heavenly Bodies
Richard de Cordova, “Emergence of the Star System”
9. Industry: Economics
American Madness (Frank Capra)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur)
Ed Buscombe, “Columbia Pictures”
Paul Kerr, “Out of What Past?”
Tino Balio “A Mature Oligopoly” and “Retrenchment…” from American Film Industry
10. Documentary
Les Maitres Fous (Jean Rouch)
Primary (Robert Drew)
Tire Die (Fernando Birri)
Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris)
Linda Williams, “Mirror without Memories”
Bill Nichols, “Documentary Modes of Representation” from Representing Reality
11. Aesthetic and Political Avant-Gardes
The Eighties (Chantal Akerman)
Hour of the Furnaces, pt. 1 (Solanas and Getino)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger)
So Is This (Michael Snow)
Peter Wollen, from Raiding the Icebox
Solanas/Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema”
12. National Cinemas
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbiner)
Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer)
Siegfried Kracauer, from From Caligari to Hitler
Thomas Elsaesser, from New German Cinema
Andrew Higson, “Concept of a National Cinema”
13. Contemporary Cinema and Postmodernity
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemekis)
Terrorizer (Eduard Yang)
Frederick Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and “Remapping Taipei”
Jean Baudrillard, from Simulacra and Simulation
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