Film History & Form II

Topics

• Examines the signifying strategies of selected cinema movements from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Familiarizes the students with the major technological and aesthetic innovations of the past 80 years which have given rise to the cinema as we know it today.
• Foster students’ awareness of the aesthetic, economic, social and political contexts in which sound cinema developed and the impact which cinema had, in turn, on nations, cultures, and historical events. Acquire a conceptual vocabulary to describe and analyze the formal strategies of films and the way they construct meaning. Introduce students to the theoretical frameworks that have shaped thinking about the cinema. Give students a clear sense of some of the major movements in sound cinema (including classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema, documentary, Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave, Third Cinema, Political Cinema of the 1960s-‘70s, and film in the era of global multimedia) and how those movements intertwined with critical, theoretical, and popular responses to the medium. Develop tools for analyzing the way film texts not only provide entertainment, but also produce cultural meanings and generate modes of experience (for example, of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation) and of social interaction.

Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes