AS3440A History of World Cinema

AS3440A HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA TO 1960 (3 cr) SP 2012
THE CORCORAN COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
DEPT. OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, moving pictures evolved from a children’s diversion to a force that transformed life at all levels, contributing significantly to American economic and cultural domination of a new world--as seen onscreen. The key issues we examine in this course remain just as relevant now as one hundred years ago: the double nature of cinema as both a capital-intensive, technologically complex medium and a collective art form; the development of conventions, genres, and narrative strategies; the dynamic between mimetic and expressionist tendencies in film art; the social and economic dimensions of film culture; and the role of national cinemas in world culture and politics. Serious consideration of how these material, social, and aesthetic issues affect cinema's status as art has formed the pattern for redefining art in all media and contexts in the past century.
Other issues that arose in the first two decades of cinema have remained central: the conventions of story-telling in narrative film; the establishment of the movies as a cheap, popular art form, defined in opposition to "high art" and the culture of the rich; the star system and its transformation of celebrity into a central, almost spiritual value; conservative and religious (and sometimes liberal/radical) opposition to the forms and subject matter of cinema as popular art; the economic and political power of Hollywood; and the identification of the film industry with the United States' international standing.

OBJECTIVES
Our study will focus on appreciating classic films both as artworks and as historical documents, emphasizing:
• The development of cinema as both a technological and a collective art form--involving social and economic practices, narrative styles and codes, genres and popular tastes.
• The production of narrative films in the tension between pseudo-documentary and fiction—between "reality" and "imagination," or mimetic and expressionistic aims
• The rise of the Hollywood production system and of national cinemas as a distinctive modern phenomenon in society and art.
• The role of cinema in creating the form and social dimensions of the modern mass audience, including the tendencies to both homogenization and the establishment of niche markets.
• The creation of history, especially national histories, through the medium of film:
How does cinema recreate and reinterpret national history?
How does cinema respond to and portray the historical forces that affect our lives?
How does cinema tell its own history, as celebration and satire?
• The relation of the rise of cinema to American cultural and economic domination of the twentieth century
• The codes of signification in cinema: how we learn to "read" films and how their conventions develop
• The artistic aims and sensibilities of major figures and movements in cinema around the world, with special emphasis on Hollywood cinema.
• The audience's creative reinterpretation of cinematic artworks outside their original historical and cultural contexts.