ENGLI/MPTV 1145
FILM HISTORY
In an ordinary film history class—including those that I took when I was in school—the instructor would begin at the beginning. You would learn about the Lumiere Brothers and Thomas Edison, inventing the machinery of cinema on opposite sides of the world simultaneously, combining the technical capacity of the still photograph with the movement of the live theatre. You would watch early films like Workers Leaving the Factory, which demonstrates the cinema’s capacity for realism; you would also watch A Trip To the Moon, an early science fiction film that reveals its talent for fantasy.
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You might then move on to studying the silent era as a whole, learning about the industrialization of the business in California after its early scattershot days in New Jersey and elsewhere around the United States, with crucial stops at the films of D.W. Griffith, the silent master whose epic Birth of a Nation (1915) is both a technical marvel and a racist artifact of an unpleasant past that carries unfortunate contemporary echoes.
No traditional film history class would be complete without pausing to worship at the altar of Citizen Kane (1941, Dir. Orson Welles), the Greatest Film of All Time, they say. Who is they? Well, them.
From there, your course might progress through a collection of “canonical” films, the ones you absolutely must see, must experience, must know in order to understand film history. You’d watch Bicycle Thieves (1948, Dir. Vittorio De Sica), Rear Window (1954, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock), The Graduate (1967, Dir. Mike Nichols), and more.
Your class would limp to a conclusion somewhere around 1990, totally missing some of the biggest changes to impact the art form of cinema around the world since it was invented, including the burgeoning reliance on franchise filmmaking in Hollywood, the rise of streaming services totally upending traditional distribution models, the use of computer generated imagery, and many more.
As you might be able to tell, I don’t think much of traditional film history courses; as a result, this one will be a bit different. That’s not to say that there’s nothing to learn from traditional, “canonical” films—there is, and many of them are celebrated for many good reasons. However, there is more than one way to study film history. We will break free of chronology, moving more freely forwards and backwards in time, looking for historical echoes and parallels across eras, countries, and movements in cinema. What does the cinema of the 1930s in Hollywood have to teach us about contemporary film culture? How do we see the influence of both Classic Hollywood and international art cinema in the mainstream American films of the 1970s? How does the impact of World War II affect film around the globe, in France, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere? The answers are not always easy to see. They don’t always reveal themselves right away, and just one film can only tell us so much.
Above all, this course will be driven by a crucial idea—that there is not one film history, but in fact, we should more appropriately refer to “film histories.” Note the plural. Cinema is the history of an art form, yes, but it is also the history of: acting; storytelling; technology; labor; culture; language; fashion; architecture; and much more. Each film is a record of its historical moment, a time capsule that reveals some aspect of what life was like when it was made, where it was made. Each film is a messenger from the past, come to teach us something about who we were, and possibly, who we still are.
The films we will study this semester will not be comprehensive. I cannot teach you film history in one semester—anyone who thinks they can is kidding themselves. However, together, we can explore how cinema helps us understand the human experience by studying context, and always returning to a crucial question: why this film at this moment?
Pre-Code Hollywood and Censorship
The Pre-Code era, a brief interregnum between the silent period and the institution of industry wide censorship in Hollywood was established in 1934.
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Classical hollywood cinema
Classical storytelling norms cohere in the 1910s with the formation of the studios, which centralize production and establish Hollywood as a dream factory relying on the genius of the system.
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hollywood during the war
World War II featured an industry-wide mobilization, as Hollywood itself marshalled its power of influence to contribute to the war effort by making films overtly propagandistic in nature.
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after the war in japan
The cataclysm of World War II shapes cinema around the world, disrupting modes of production and storytelling.
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the french new wave
Arguably the most influential and well-known of the groundbreaking international movements, the French New Wave offered numerous examples of films that deconstructed style.
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Cinema Verite and Direct Cinema
Documentary filmmakers long interested in capturing reality increasingly begin to turn to styles known as direct cinema and cinema verite, highly influential modes of expression that have an impact on documentary and narrative cinema alike.
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Noir
The pessimism of postwar America takes root in film noir, with black and white stories of darkness and doom.
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westerns
At one time, Hollywood made more Westerns than any other kind of movie; they established a certain kind of heroic myth about America’s past.
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the coming of sound
Film has always been a technological medium, and the coming of sound in the late 1920s was an earthquake for a nascent industry that had built itself on visual storytelling. Filmmakers working with new tools not only had to learn how to adjust, they had to take advantage of sound’s storytelling capabilities.
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