SEPTEMBER 17

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

Automatic Hat and Sausage Machine; How Monsieur Takes His Bath; Alice Guy Films a “Phonoscène” in the Studio at Buttes-Chaumont, Paris; Indiscreet Questions (Guy 1900, 1903, 1907, 1906)  DVD 4408 

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 23):

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

Paper topic (paper due September 24. Send all papers via email to gmairs@calarts.edu):

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. Begin with description and please follow the guidelines laid out in "Writing Film Essays" in the reader.