School Daze

0.5 credits · Undergraduate

This first-year foundation course is a survey of sound film (with a brief selection of silent shorts) on the topic of how popular cinemas have represented going to school. Looking at one film and one scholarly text a week, the course will offer an introduction to the close reading of film texts, reading and writing film criticism, and the fundamentals of film history. By engaging with only one film/reading per week, the course emphasizes depth over breadth. Texts for the course may include excerpts from Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film , Sturken and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking , Staiger’s Interpreting Films , and Prince’s Movies and Meaning , along with selected criticism on the movies screened. Those films may include Zero for Conduct , Aparajito , Tom Brown’s School Days, Tea and Sympathy , If , Rock and Roll High School , Mean Girls , School Daze , Blackboard Jungle , or Lady Bird. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.