Introduction to Film History
Course Syllabus by J. Cuasay

(For permission to use contact: nasubi@juno.com)

Course Objective:

This course is designed to enable students to evaluate films in terms of their aesthetic and historical relationship. As such, a film will not be treated in isolation but in a progression of its economic, political, and social histories as well as its relationship to other art forms. Ideally, a student should be able to relate films to their historical roots and be able to appreciate and evaluate films by associating them with certain movements or types of films that preceded them.

Course Text(s):

Film Art: An Introduction
by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (McGraw Hill 1993)

The Documentary Idea
by Jack Ellis (Prentice Hall 1989)

Additional handouts will be provided to enhance lectures and screenings. Further suggested readings will be offered on a personal basis related to individual student interests. (See additional readings attached).

Students are expected to attend all lectures and screenings. A journal is to be kept with at least one page of entry per lecture and screening. This journal will be submitted as part of the midterm grade and at the end of term as part of the final grade.

There is a midterm exam. It will be an in class written exam.

In addition to the journal, students must write one or two papers under the following guidelines:

I) Take a contemporary film and demonstrate how it makes use of a previous example and explain why it does or does not succeed. (This is literally an attempt to make present and past meaningful to each other through the viewer.) OR

II) Take a film from a certain period and demonstrate how its social-historical milieu contributes to its failure or success, in terms of its value. That is, the viewer evaluates the film in terms of its historical context in order to derive an aesthetic reading of it. (This approach is different than the first example in that it does not connect present and past; however, it does require the student to derive his or her own method of periodization.)

III) Do a cross cultural film analysis and explain why the different culture/history contributes to this film's failure or success, in terms of its value. (This approach is on the surface a compare and contrast paper without specifically addressing any history. As such, however, it forces the viewer to confront his or her relativism in their methodology.)

Papers can be submitted as one final term paper or as two separate papers. As separate papers, they should be 10-15 pages with at least five sources. As final term papers the length should be between 15 and 20 with more than 5 sources.

mid-term: 20%
journal: 40%
final paper 40% OR two papers 20% each

Origins and early films
Zoetropes, kinetoscopes, Edison, Melies, Lumiere
Screenings: Workers Leaving a Factory, Trip to the Moon

Porter and Griffith
Handout: D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative film by Tom Gunning (1991) - Chapter 2
Screening: Great Train Robbery, Broken Blossoms, The Cheat (suggested)
Handouts on Alice Guy Blache Cinema Century Vol. 1 (16-17).
Immigrants, ethnics and gender in early cinema
Handout: Unspeakable Images ed. Lester D. Friedman (1991) - Chapter 2

German Expressionism
fine arts movements and film - from vaudeville to the art house
Screening: Dr. Caligari
handout from Wide Angle Vol. 6, No. 1 "Authorship as a Commodity: The Art Cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" by Michael Budd.

Russian films of the 1920's
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov
Handouts and reading from Film Theory and Criticism by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (1992) - Part II, Pudovkin and Eisenstein - Part III, Kracauer.
Screening: scenes from Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera

Origins of documentary and its connections to the other arts
Flaherty, Grierson (and Vertov)

Screenings: Rain, Berlin, then Nanook, Night Mail. Louisiana Story (suggested)
Influences of the coming of sound: the cinema verite debates in the 60's

Hollywood Studio era
Hollywood, from industry and star system to the Studio System,
Major genres up to the 40's
Screening: The Story of Louis Pasteur
Handout from Wide Angle Vol. 8. No. 2 "Film History as Social History: The Dieterle/Warner Brothers Bio-pic" by Thomas Elsaesser.

Midterm Screening: Ed Wood

Italian Neorealism
Screening: La Strada

French New Wave
Screening: Breathless

Final Screening: Bontoc Eulogy (the use of film history as formal meditation on society and art.)

Of help for those with a general or limited background in film are the following:

Understanding the Movies by Louis Giannetti (Prentice Hall, 1990)
Emphasis on Chapter 10 with supporting emphasis from Chapters 1,2,3,4,5,7,8

Screenplay by Syd Field (Dell Publishing, 1984)
Generally useful for the outline of plot construction in a narrative script with a readerly approach to camera positioning.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (Viking Press, 1973)
An excellent pocket reference for the relationship between the concept of realism in the fine arts and how it appears in mass media.

Cinema Century Volume 1: The First 50 Years edited by Celia Rosebury Lighthill (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1994).
This is a film reader much like that of a social studies texts one might read in a coffee table book format. As such it only scratches the surface, but it is easily accessible and thought provoking. It also documents all the sources it cites so that one can do more rigorous research.

Mythologies by Roland Barthes (Noonday Press, 1957)
Several good examples of how to relate everyday events and objects such as advertisements or tv shows with the larger social order. His theory is summarized briefly in the final chapter.

Six Guns and Society by Will Wright (University of California Press, 1975)
Although there are problem with this work as structural anthropology, Wright's main thesis that there is a correspondence between the development of the western as a genre and the economic development of American society is in the vein of one type of way of approaching film in context to social history.

New Hollywood Vol. 5, No. 4

"The American Film Industry of the 1970's" by Douglas Gomery.
Gomery essentially writes in a detailed way that despite the influx of a "new breed" of young directors in Hollywood, that the basic structure of Hollywood as an institution and how film was produced and related to its audience remained unchanged.

"Rewriting the History of Film in the United States: Theory and Method - A review by Douglas Gomery of Screening Out The Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry by Lary May."
An interesting evaluation of social history applied to film history in which Gomery takes May to task about his research methods and evidence.

Authorship Vol. 6, No. 1

"Authorship as a Commodity: The Art Cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" by Michael Budd.
This article combines the notions of art cinema and how the notions of authorship as it relates to the production and commodification of art makes Caligari a unique historical case.

"A Critique of Film History" by Brian Henderson as reviewed by John O'Kane.
This review centers around readings of Andre Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein in light of the tensions between post structural microanalyses of film and the "sociology of art." Though such a description may seem complicated, it is an issue that the class will address: how do you relate a particular film to ongoing history?

Film and Social History Vol. 8, No. 2

"Film History and Social History: Reproducing Social Relationships" by Mary Beth Haralovich.
This essay provides a good overview of the three major debates in social history and methods of reconstructing social relationships: issues of synchrony and diachrony, the status of empirical evidence, and post structural concerns of text and subjectivity.

"Film History as Social History: The Dieterle/Warner Brothers Bio-pic" by Thomas Elsaesser.
This article suggests viewing the Bio-pic as a subtle deviation from the more dominant genres of the Studio Era. As such it reveals an attempt on the part of Hollywood to give the appearance of innovation and expansion while its ideology remains the same. There is a connection here between theatre and film art, film consumption, and how films like these attempt to represent history as if they were history.