UT128 Understanding Movies Bklt.Qxp

UNDERSTANDING MOVIES: THE ART AND HISTORY OF FILM COURSE GUIDE Professor Raphael Shargel PROVIDENCE COLLEGE Understanding Movies: The Art and History of Film Professor Raphael Shargel Providence College Recorded Books™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. Understanding Movies: The Art and History of Film Professor Raphael Shargel Executive Producer John J. Alexander Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan RECORDING Producer - David Markowitz Director - Matthew Cavnar COURSE GUIDE Editor - James Gallagher Design - Ed White Lecture content ©2008 by Raphael Shargel Course guide ©2008 by Recorded Books, LLC 72008 by Recorded Books, LLC #UT128 ISBN: 978-1-4361-4167-3 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus Understanding Movies: The Art and History of Film About Your Professor...................................................................................................4 Introduction...................................................................................................................5 Lecture 1 The Origins of Cinema and the Grammar of Film .................................6 Lecture 2 Film Imagery and the Theory of Montage ...........................................11 Lecture 3 Storytelling in the 1930s: Stagecoach ................................................16 Lecture 4 Citizen Kane: An American Masterpiece.............................................21 Lecture 5 World War II and the Cinema of Community: Casablanca, Now, Voyager, and It’s a Wonderful Life........................26 Lecture 6 Noir and Neorealism: Bicycle Thieves and On the Waterfront............31 Lecture 7 Love and the Mirror of Death: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo ...................37 Lecture 8 Widescreen: The World Writ Large and Intimate: The Apartment .....................................................................................42 Lecture 9 The New Wave in France: The 400 Blows and Week-end .................47 Lecture 10 The American New Wave I: Politics and Family: The Godfather......................................................................................52 Lecture 11 The American New Wave II: The Social Canvas: Nashville................57 Lecture 12 The Rule of the Blockbuster: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark........................................................................62 Lecture 13 Gender, Race, and the Varieties of Cinematic Experience: Vagabond, Do the Right Thing, and Lone Star ...................................67 Lecture 14 The Contemporary Maverick: Goodfellas, Million Dollar Baby, and Persepolis.....................................................74 Films for Further Viewing ...........................................................................................80 Books of Interest ........................................................................................................85 3 About Your Professor Raphael Shargel Photo © Suzanne Herzberg Raphael Shargel is associate professor of English at Providence College, where he teaches seventeenth-century literature, Shakespeare, drama, and film. He is also active in Providence College’s program in the Development of Western Civilization, a team-taught interdisciplinary course that traces Western literature, history, philosophy, theology, and the arts from their beginnings to the present day. Professor Shargel received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and his B.A. from Yale. Passionate about teaching, he has conduct- ed film and literature classes for students of all ages. But he works chiefly at the college level, where he has developed a reputation as a thought-provok- ing lecturer and leader of class discussion. His film classes include introduc- tions to the history and aesthetics of the cinema as well as courses on film romance, political film, the representation of race in American cinema, Southern life in Hollywood movies, and seminars devoted to directors such as John Ford and William Wyler. Most recently, he developed and taught a course on film noir. He has also taught literature surveys and classes in the Victorian novel, medieval literature, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, and English composition. Recent publications include an edition of collected interviews with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and articles on playwright Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s great contemporary, which concentrate on Jonson’s literary theory, his neglected works, and the history of his critical reception. Since 1996, Professor Shargel has been the film critic for The New Leader, a journal of news analysis and opinion that has been in publication for over eighty-five years. It is now available exclusively online. From 1997 to 2000, he reviewed movies on WINA radio in Charlottesville, Virginia. In its early days, before the era of customer reviews, Professor Shargel was the film books editor for Amazon.com. He has written articles about the current cinema for MSNBC.com. Professor Shargel lives with his wife, Mia, also a film enthusiast, to whom he dedicates these lectures with love. 4 INTRODUCTION Why does the cinema have the power to move the heart, stimulate the mind, and dazzle the imagina- tion? How did the art of film develop from its origins to the present day? This course covers the history and aesthetics of the movies. It traces the experiments and innovations that gave rise to the modern cinema, developing a vocabulary that helps explain the variety of choices filmmakers make when they con- struct shots and edit them together. In each lecture, Professor Raphael Shargel introduces a period of film history, talks about its importance, covers aspects of cinematic tech- nique, and illustrates his points by analyzing specific movies from the era under discussion. The course thus has both breadth and depth, covering the major movements in film history while at the same time focusing on key pictures worthy of study and enjoyment. The moviegoing experience is © D. Daitschel/shutterstock.com communal. Films are meant to be shared by audiences, both in the theater when they are shown, and at the water cooler or the dinner table where they are discussed. In this spirit, the course concentrates on films that offer grand social visions, describing the relationship between individuals and the communities in which they live. Because the course develops chronologically, it also investigates how filmmakers diverge from, comment upon, and reinvent the themes and ideas of their predecessors. While Understanding Movies is chiefly devoted to films made in the United States, it also investigates important movements in European cinema, such as German Expressionism, Soviet montage, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave. The filmmakers studied include D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Jean- Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. As listeners learn from their professor about this modern art form, they are also provided with guides for further exploration of the cinema’s riches. 5 Lecture 1: The Origins of Cinema and the Grammar of Film Suggested Viewing Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Louis Lumière, 1895) Arrival of Train at La Ciotat (Louis Lumière, 1896) A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) The Art Form of Our Time Every era has its popular art forms, entertainments that reach the greatest number of people. In preliterate culture, the majority of audiences enjoyed what could be transmitted orally: recitations of tales, songs, and theatrical presentations. With the increase of the reading public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel was king. The twentieth century brought radio, film, and television to the fore. But of these, film is the most versatile and the one that most fully shows us who we are. Impossible without the new tech- nologies created in our age, it is also distinct from all other arts. We often hear that we live in a visual culture. The more we learn about how the visual imagery with which we are inundated has influenced and transformed us, the better we understand our world. Our Course of Study In Understanding Film, we will cover the history of film from its origins to the present day. Because we Terms to Remember are English speakers, we will concentrate our atten- tion on English-language films, but will take some Persistence of vision necessary excursions into Europe. Our overview will 24 frames per second offer a compromise between depth and breadth. Cut With each lecture, we’ll cover a period in the Shot progress of film history, looking at developments in Take every decade that movies were produced from the Set-up 1890s to the 2000s. As we do so, we’ll explore the Long shot grammar of film, expanding our vocabulary so we Extreme long shot can speak with more facility about the effect cinema Medium shot has upon us. In the second part of each lecture, we’ll look in detail at a film or three that exemplifies Two shot the period and ideas we are covering. Close-up High angle I hope you’ll be able to view or review some of the pictures we’ll analyze. All of them are worth seeing; Low angle all are available on video. When you watch them at Pan home, remember that only in the last few decades Tilt did filmmakers recognize that

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