Course Description
Cinema is the foremost art of the last 100 years and as viewers we have developed habits of watching that sometime obscure our awareness of how the art of cinema achieves its effects and tells its stories. In this class we carefully examine the techniques of the moving image - mise en scène, cinematography, editing, sound - and the early formation of the now easily recognizable styles of most cinema. In assembling a technical and analytic vocabulary to understand and assess style in film art, students begin to evaluate the formal and narrative properties of fictional film. Form relates to how we experience feeling and meaning as film audiences; it also relates to the formal properties of film (such as repetition and variation of distinct themes or elements, development, and the overall effects of unity and disunity). Narrative relates to the structure of plots and the flow of story information in cinema. Once students understand the stylistic, formal and narrative properties of film they can then fulfil a main objective of this course: the critical analysis and evaluation of recent examples of the cinematic art.
