To get us started this semester I am going to spend the first two
classes giving you background lectures about some
basic cinematic
concepts. Once you are a little more
familiar with basic film
terminology, we will be ready to look at the history of movies in the
United States. You’ll be expected to attend showing of films on Tuesday
evenings at 7 o’clock in Jennings Auditorium. That’s our lab. Then
during our Wednesday seminar, we’ll discuss in depth the movie we saw
the night before. We are not covering silent films in this course. We
will begin with the first talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer,
released in 1927. The next week, we’ll be looking at The Gold Diggers
of 1933, a piece that is very representative of the escapist trend in
films released during the depression. Some of the films we will be
watching will probably be new to you, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight.
Others you might have already seen on TV like Rebel without A Cause
starring James Deane, or Stanley Cooper’s Doctor’s Strange Love.
However, I hope you see even familiar film with new eye. In the last
three weeks of the course, we will be watching films from the 1980s and
you’ll choose one of them as a subject for an extensive written
critique. We’ll talk more about the requirements of the critique later
in this semeste