Spring 2025
Prereq: none
Units: 3-3-6 HASS-A, CI-H
Films are familiar to you; this course should make them strange again.
The Film Experience serves as an introduction to film studies, concentrating on close analysis and criticism. Students will learn the technical vocabulary for analyzing cinematic narrative, framing, editing, color, sound, and lighting; develop the critical means for turning close analysis into interpretations and comparative readings of films; and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship, reflexivity, and ideology. We will look beyond the surface pleasures of cinema to ask how films are put together; what choices are made formally, narratively, and politically in the constructions of different types of films; and how films have changed historically and in different production and national contexts. We will study a wide example of works made between 1895 and 2023 and heralding from over a dozen countries, ranging from early silent experiments, documentary and avant-garde films, and canonical European art cinema, to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong melodrama, and Iranian cinema. Directors include Ana Lily Amirpour, Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Greta Gerwig, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, Roberto Rossellini, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, and Wong Kar-wai.
Format: one required 90-minute lecture, one required evening screening, and one discussion hour per week.