Films:
L'Atalante (Vigo 1933) Blu-Ray 039
Las Hurdes (Buñuel 1933) DVD 4149
excerpts from:
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Le Roy 1933) Cal Arts 16mm / DVD 2459 - opening through 5:03
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen/Kelly 1952) DVD 015 - 51:22 through 59:36
Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian 1932) DVD 1286 - 1:43 through 7:29, then 11:14 through 18:52
Une Femme est une femme (Godard 1960) DVD 1106 - opening through 6:00
Reading (to be done by November 12):
Farber, Manny. "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," in course reader.
Paper topic (paper due October 13. Graduate students send papers via email to elkrugamigos@earthlink.net; undergraduates send papers also cc to TA Masahiko Fox at gracefulbrute@gmail.com):
The exercises thus
far have been about identifying and discussing formal issues in the films.
That’s because I believe that if you talk about a film without being very
specific in discussing how it achieves its effects, you’re not really talking
about the film – you’re usually just recounting plot and treating the movie as
thought it were a short story or a play rather than cinema.
But now that you’ve had a half semester of practice, it’s time to use these tools. I’d like you to talk about L’Atalante, Las Hurdes or last week’s film, Street Angel. Talk about anything you like about the film, with two considerations: as always, “I liked it” or “I hated it” is not sufficient and you will have to rewrite your paper if that’s all you do. Second, you must root whatever you discuss in formal analysis – if, for example, you want to talk about L’Atalante as a love story, find a scene that exemplifies this and talk about it in cinematic terms – how does Vigo approach the scene as cinema to convey his meanings?
What you talk about is less
important than the approach you take – think of this as practice for the final
paper, where I will expect your arguments to be developed with respect to how
the work is shot, edited, performed, etc etc, NEVER just what happens in the
story.
