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
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.
