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Course Discription |
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This course introduces students to the basics of film analysis, cinematic formal elements, genre, and narrative structure and helps students develop the skills to recognize, analyze, describe and enjoy film as an art and entertainment form. To understand how films are constructed to make meaning and engage audiences, students will be introduced to the basic “building blocks” and formal elements (narrative, miseen-scene, cinematography, sound and editing) that make up the film as well as some fundamental principles of analysis, genre, style, performance and storytelling. This course offers students an in-depth analysis of the history of film theory and criticism. Beginning with early debates about the cinema (in the light of wider debates about the significance of an emerging mass culture), we will survey cognitive, formal and ideologyfocused theories of film, in order to better comprehend the nature of the medium and its relationship to the other arts, society, and spectatorship. The writings of the following theorists and others will serve as the major texts for the course: Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Louis Commolli, Christian Metz, Noel Burch, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey. |