SEPTEMBER 25

Films:

Musketeers of Pig Alley (Griffith 1912) DVD 536

Broken Blossoms (Griffith 1919) DVD 244

Reading (to be done by October 1):

Tom Gunning, "D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film," in course reader.

Vsevold Pudovkin, "On Editing," in course reader.

Paper topic (paper due October 2. Graduate students send papers via email to elkrugamigos@earthlink.net; undergraduates send papers also cc to TA Masahiko Fox at gracefulbrute@gmail.com):

Write again about the scene you explored last week, this time focusing on the editing. Instead of describing the content of each shot, talk about how the shots work together. The crucial questions are: how long is each shot, and why? And why do you think the filmmakers change from one camera position to the next in the course of the scene – what does the audience get from these shifts in perspective? Finally, how noticeable are these cuts as you watch the film?

SEPTEMBER 18

Films:

Workers Leaving the Factory; Train Arriving at a Station; The Sprinkler Sprinkled; Snowball Fight (Lumières 1895-1897) DVD 467

Four Troublesome Heads; The Astronomer's Dream; The Skipping Cheese; Eclipse: or, the Courtship of the Sun and Moon (Méliès 1898, 1898, 1907, 1907) DVD 3303, disks 1 and 4

The Dancing Pig (Pathé company 1907) DVD 2743

The Golden Beetle (Zecca 1907) DVD 467

The Great Train Robbery (Porter 1903) DVD 467

Making an American Citizen (Guy 1912) DVD 467

A Corner in Wheat (Griffith 1909) DVD 1180

Heart of the World (Maddin 2000) DVD 2025

Premonition Following an Evil Deed aka Lumière (Lynch 2000) DVD 810

Fire and Rain (Benning 2009) 

Reading (to be done by September 24):

Roberta Pearson, "Early Cinema," in course reader.

Paper topic (paper due September 25. Graduate students send papers via email to elkrugamigos@earthlink.net; undergraduates send papers also cc to TA Masahiko Fox at gracefulbrute@gmail.com):

Discuss the use of composition in a single scene from one of your favorite movies, focusing in particular on whether the framing is open or closed (most films use a combination of both styles), what these choices say about the world surrounding the story, and why the scene is composed in such a way. Keep it very simple: no more than two or three consecutive shots.