Film Studies 1

Following the highly regarded, formally-oriented, approach set out in Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art, this course introduces students to the technologies and techniques of cinema from the first half of its greater than one-hundred year history. Students examine the emergence of conflicting styles and theories of film in the early 20th Century as filmmakers and critics attempted to define and defend their preferred versions of this new art form. They carefully assess the development of techniques - mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound - and the early formation of the now easily recognizable styles of most cinema. In assembling a technical and analytic vocabulary to understand and assess style in film art, we progressively move through the history of cinema until the early 1950s. By understanding the specific technical elements of cinema students come to grasp how these elements collectively function as a film language and contribute to the establishing of distinct film styles.