About
This course will provide students with a broad introduction to the history of French cinema. France has arguably the most avid, energetic, and versatile film culture of any single nation in the world, including our own. The academic discipline of Film Studies would simply not exist without the French; critics such as Andr' Bazin, the "auteur" critics of Cahiers du Cin'ma and Positif in the 1950s, and later scholars such as Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Jean-Louis Baudry, who brought semiotics and psychoanalysis in the field were advocates and analysts of the possibilities of film and its meanings in the modern world. Cinema got its formal start in France. The first public film screening anywhere was presented by Pierre and Auguste Lumi're in Paris on December 28, 1895. Among other French contributions to film culture were the first science fiction/fantasy films (of Georges M'li's), the wide-screen lens, the idea of film noir, the Auteur Theory, and the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), which revolutionized film style around the world in the 1960s. Students will learn the important styles, periods, and directors of French cinema. They will develop an appreciation for the philosophical and aesthetic ideas informing French film, the cultural and political cultures out of which the films are produced, and the unique cross-pollination between the French and American cinemas.
Resources