Looking and Listening to the Movies: An Introduction to Film Art

• Week 1: Realism vs. formalism
  We begin with a fundamental tension at the heart of cinema: is film a window onto the world or a carefully constructed illusion? We’ll question what it means to “capture reality” on screen and to notice how even the most natural-looking images are shaped by aesthetic choices. These opposing film styles—realism and formalism—and their balance, will quietly haunt everything we watch for the rest of the course.
  
  • Excerpts: Early cinema shorts (the Lumiere Brothers, Georges Méliès)
  • Excerpt: Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• Week 2: The world viewed—mise-en-scène
  This week is about learning to look. We slow down and pay attention to what fills the frame: actor performances, lighting, costumes and props. We’ll ask how meaning emerges from arrangement and atmosphere, and why everything put on screen has an intentionality. Mise-en-scène becomes a way of understanding how films build worlds—how those worlds invite us to think and feel and how they can immerse us in the story or take us out of it.
  
  • Excerpts: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920)
  • Excerpts: The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, 1949)
  • Excerpts: Bicycle Thieves (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
  • Excerpt: In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
• Week 3: Cinematography—the image and the frame
  Here we turn to the camera itself: where it stands or is positioned, how it moves and what it allows us to see—or not see. We’ll explore the shot and how framing, distance and movement shape our emotional and affective relationship to what is on screen. We’ll recognize the camera is not simply a neutral observer, but an expressive presence with a point of view.
  
  • Excerpts: Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
  • Excerpts: Touch of Evil (dir. Orsen Welles, 1958)
  • Excerpts: Cléo from 5 to 7 (dir. Agnès Varda, 1962)
  • Excerpts Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016)
• Week 4: Editing—combining images
  Editing is where cinema begins to think in time. We’ll explore how meaning, emotion and rhythm emerge when images collide, flow or pause, by looking at the style of continuity editing preferred by Hollywood cinema versus art cinema editing. By examining cuts, transitions and pacing, we discover how films guide attention, create tension and sometimes ask us to work harder as viewers. Editing reveals how much of cinema happens between images rather than within them, and how combining images produce new meanings.
  
  • Excerpts: Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942.)
  • Excerpts: The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946)
  • Excerpts: Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
  • Excerpts: Daisies (dir. Věra Chytilová, 1966)
• Week 5: Film sound—listening to the movies
  Most of us are trained to watch films, but not to listen to them. This week sharpens our ears by focusing on sounds inside and outside the image, on voices, music, silence and sonic space. We explore how sound shapes mood, directs emotion and how it complements the image or tells a different story from what we see on screen. You may find that once you really start listening, films never sound the same again.
  
  • Excerpts: City Lights (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
  • Excerpts: M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1931)
  • Excerpts: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (dir. Fritz Lang, 1933)
  • Excerpts: The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)
  • Excerpts: Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)
• Week 6: Narrative cinema—classical Hollywood narrative
  We close by examining the storytelling model that has shaped how most of us learned to watch movies. By breaking down classical Hollywood narrative, we explore how cinematic form works to often render invisible its mode of filmmaking to immerse audiences into the film world. At the same time, we begin to notice the Hollywood aesthetic rules we’ve learned to internalize—and what happens when films follow them, bend them or simply refuse them.
  
  • Excerpts: Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) Bottom of Form
  • Excerpts: Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1945)
  • Excerpts: Taste of Chery (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
  • Excerpts: Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000)

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Describe the central terminology of film art or film aesthetics
• Identify and analyze film form and narrative techniques
• Recognize the difference between mise-en-scène, cinematography and editing techniques
• Read a film through its unique use of visual and aural language
• Distinguish how various filmic techniques contribute to the overall meaning of a film

• Lectures
• Viewing film clips (from films around the world including various film movements)
• Academic and non-academic articles
• Participation in class discussions
• Reflective essay (applicable only to certificate students)

No textbook is required. We will provide all course materials online.