This course provides an introduction to the history of cinema, exploring its many facets and uses, from commercial entertainment to a tool for people to document their most intimate moments. We’ll explore major and minor movements in cinema from around the world and across time, from mainstream mass entertainment industries to revolutionary cinema movements to the emergence of the moving image as a central medium in contemporary art. Theoretical and aesthetic ideas of filmmakers themselves will be examined as they develop over time and across cultures, including ideas related to realism, fantasy, abstraction, and expression, as well as ideas about narrative/fiction film, documentary/non-fiction, personal/poetic, and film as art. We’ll look at work coming not only from the mainstream commercial cinema centers of the world (including—but not limited to—Los Angeles, Cairo, Mumbai, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong), but also independent film movements (for instance the L.A. Rebellion and the various new waves of France, Taiwan, and Germany), underground film cultures (expanded cinema and the avant garde), political film activists (including the Palestine Film Unit and ACT UP), moving image in the art world (video art, performance art, and multi-channel installation) and home movies.Students will learn to “read” a film, not just by following the plot, but by examining and interpreting the filmic mise-en-scene, the photographic image, editing, cinematography, and the relation of sound to image. We will integrate our investigations of cinematic issues with those of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality.

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