ENG 261 - Introduction to Film

America Lost and Found: Cinema of the 1960s and 70s
When films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Easy Rider hit theaters in the late 1960s, they sent a shockwave through the industry that did not abate until the late 1970s. America was at a crossroads. These were years of radical change, boiling over with events that would forever alter the landscape of politics, see ruptures in the economy, and challenge our understanding of gender and sexuality. These are the years of the Civil Rights movement, sexual liberation, queer liberation and a second wave of feminism. Not to mention the war in Vietnam. And the counterculture that embraced change (and music, and drugs). Filmmakers were there to put it all on screen. The old Hollywood studio system was crumbling. A restrictive production code fell away. And a new generation of actors, screenwriters, producers, and directors took their chance to remake the image of America on screen. This class will examine these years of revolutionary cinema - what some have called the greatest era of American film. We will examine the rise of independent filmmaking from producers and directors such as John Cassvettes and Roger Corman. The epic films of Francis Ford Coppola. The gritty New York streets of Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, and Paul Schrader. The large companies that populate Robert Altman’s work and the intimate films of Bob Rafelson. The pioneering voices of women directors such as Barbara Loden, Joan Micklin Silver, and Elaine May. The genre revision and parodies of Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks. The rise of Blaxploitation and directors Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks. It truly was a time when America was both lost and found.

Film Noir
This course will focus on film noir in American cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, examining its plotlines and narrative methods as well as its distinctive visual style. Students will be introduced to the language of film analysis and trace the genre’s sources in “hard-boiled” detective fiction, German expressionism, and the cultural climate of the United States in the decades in which the films were produced. Questions about visual framing, narrative structure, and genre will inform readings and discussions, as will the films’ representations of tensions in postwar social roles. The course will conclude with a consideration of one or two more recent examples of “neo-noir.” Required readings on film and narrative theory; directors will include Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Michael Curtiz.

Italian Cinema
This course will provide a survey of Italian film history, from the silent period to the present. Italy, a unified country only in the 1860s, barely a generation before the invention of cinema, has distinct identities-unique histories, customs, and dialect-linked to its diverse regions. To better understand their differences and shared experiences, we will examine major film movements, such as Neorealism, alongside the historical shifts such as the “economic miracle” and art cinema of the 1950s, the rise of “Spaghetti Westerns” and Giallo horror films of the 1960s and 70s, anti-fascist films in the postwar era, alongside Commedia all’italiana. We will examine how social and historical forces helped develop the Italian film industry, along with landmark films and directors as they connect to these shifts in Italian cinema, charting its evolution over the last 100-plus years. This course will explore the work of Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Lina Wertmüller, Luchino Visconti, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Vittorio De Sica, alongside contemporary masters who continue to interrogate the shifting dynamics of Italian politics and society, such as Alice Rohrwacher, Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino, and Ferzan Özpetek.

The Western
Film studies scholar Robert Ray once wrote that “many of Classic Hollywood’s genre movies, like many of the most important American novels, were thinly camouflaged westerns.” This course seeks to investigate that claim by examining film form, genre, and history through the lens of the cinematic Western, with all of the idealism and ugliness the subject entails. While the beginning of the course will focus primarily on the Western as imagined in classical Hollywood, our analysis will eventually track the genre’s development into the modern day. We will watch and analyze films by directors including John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Sergio Leone, Richard Altman, Katherine Bigelow, Mario van Peebles, Ang Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. In addition to illuminating the concept of genre study and the history of U.S. film, this course will view the Western as a barometer of both American social anxieties and ideologies as the genre (and the nation) continually reinvents itself over time.

Women Directors of the 21st Century
This course is an overview of some of the women directors working in contemporary cinema. The course takes a global approach, and we will examine filmmakers who make Hollywood blockbusters as well as independent productions. Each of these directors have made films examining vital subjects such as poverty, racism, sexism, and discrimination. They have used various means and forms to do so, utilizing superheroes and cowboys, men and women, genre films and character studies, narrative, and documentary forms. They have filmed the landscapes as well as the interior struggles of their characters. This is all to say, there is no defining feature of their work. Their varied characters reflect their diverse backgrounds. In this course we will examine how autobiographical, political, social, industrial, and historical forces helped shape their films, as well as both the communal and individual achievements of some of the major artists of the era. This class also serves as a way to buid on the accepted film canon, highlighting the work done by women directors over the last thirty years. It is a celebration of their body of work, as well as an academic examination of their films. Some of the directors include Chantal Akerman, Kelly Reichardt, Ava DuVernay, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis, Chloe Zhao, Greta Gerwig, Karyn Kusama, Jane Campion, Andrea Arnold, Mati Diop, and Marjane Satrapi.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference-screening
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 4 times for credit if different topics.
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.
Genre: Film & Media

Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).