OCTOBER 22
Films:
Un
Chien Andalou (Buñuel/Dali, 1929) DVD 1905
Les
Vampires, ep. 2: The Ring That Kills (Feuillade, 1916) DVD 1645
The
Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1922) reserve DVD
Ballet
Mecanique (Léger/Murphy,
1926) DVD 1636
The
Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (Vorkapich/Florey, 1928) DVD 1636
At
Land (Deren,
1945) DVD 1620
Fireworks (Anger,
1947) DVD 3937
Reading (to be done by
October 28):
Luis Buñuel. “Cinema,
Instrument of Poetry,”" in course reader.
Germaine Dulac. “The
Avant-Garde Cinema,” in course reader.
Paper topic (paper due
October 29. Graduate students send papers via email to gmairs@calarts.edu;
undergraduates send papers to TA Matthew Lax at laxco@outlook.com):
Take one small moment in any of the
films we’ve screened today, and discuss it at length. The idea is to begin with
formal analysis – how is this moment shot, lit, edited, etc – and move from
there to a discussion of what marks that moment as unusual. These films aren’t
simply weird, they’re carefully crafted in ways that challenge our ideas about
how films are “supposed” to work, and I want you to discuss how. You’re going
to need to see whatever scene you discuss again – luckily, they are all
available on YouTube.
“If cinema is to take its place besides the others as a
full-fledged art form, it must cease merely to record realities that owe
nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must
create a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instrument as
to be inseparable from its means. It must relinquish the narrative disciplines
it has borrowed from literature and its timid imitation of the causal logic of
narrative plots, a form which flowered as a celebration of the earth-bound,
step-by-step concept of time, space and relationship which was part of the
primitive materialism of the nineteenth century. Instead, it must develop the
vocabulary of filmic images and evolve the syntax of filmic techniques which
relate those. It must determine the disciplines inherent in the medium,
discover its own structural modes, explore the new realms and dimensions
accessible to it and so enrich our culture artistically as science has done in
its own province.” - Maya Deren
