Cinema Curriculum

The key to understanding the 20th century and the cultural power of the American empire lies in interpreting film, and the infrastructure behind it.

Because the art of cinema naturally lends itself to sensuality, this curriculum is intended for secondary students and undergraduates at a level of maturity where they will not be disturbed by depictions of violence or infatuated with depictions of sexuality.

What was that old saying of the wise? Viewer discretion is advised.

Remember: moving pictures are an illusion of life. Just because it's animated does not mean it has a living spirit. God requires that we do not worship images. We must not love them; we must taste test them instead. Marvelously, imagination mingles with reality. Our enjoyment should be in appreciating how films help us bring reality into focus more clearly. If they fail in that, there is nothing left to do but disparage them.

As such we need to hone our critical faculties; we need to deepen our awareness of historical context and our intertextual hermeneutics to begin to understand what the images we're seeing might ultimately mean and how they are trying to manipulate us emotionally. What makes for a good, meaningful life? Who is beautiful and who is ugly? What is heroic and what is dishonorable? Is providence at work?

Sadly, the vast majority of people today have formed their basic assumptions and moral values and self-conception on what they have seen in film and television. Many of these frames of mind are very bad and should be torn apart in the fear of God.

Because it is so psychological, filmmaking and film criticism is ultimately an act of spiritual warfare. A priestly task. We must test all these symbols and stories we use to make sense of who we are in the universe and how we relate to one another.

With that in mind, welcome to a survey of earth's Primitive Cinematic Neanderthrashings.

Invention & Early Days

Intro

General Readings - Melies, Lumiere, Edison

Films to Review: Earliest Films Guide

1890s:

• Arrival of A Train
• Workers Leaving The Factory
• La Lune A Un Metre
• Le Cauchemar
• The Kiss
• Boxing Cats
• The Cabbage Patch Fairy
• Serpentine Dance

1900s:

• A Trip to the Moon
• Joan of Arc
• The Great Train Robbery
• The Infernal Cauldron
• La Fée Carabosse ou le poignard fatal
• The Consequences of Feminism
• The Kingdom of Fairies
• The Big Swallow
• The Man with the Rubber Head
• A Corner in Wheat
• The Dancing Pig
• Life of An American Fireman
• Alice in Wonderland
• La Sirene

The Beginning of Hollywood

General Readings - D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Guy-Blanche, Douglas Fairbanks, Maurice Tourneur, Harold Lloyd, Lois Weber

Films to Review: Hollywood's Beginnings

• Intolerance
• A Dog's Life
• The Blue Bird
• The Immigrant
• True Heart Susie
• Shoulder Arms
• Easy Street
• Blind Husbands
• Suspense
• The Cure
• One AM
• The Pawnshop
• The Adventurer
• The Unchanging Sea
• The Avenging Conscience
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley
• The Vagabond
• Behind the Screen
• The Mystery of the Leaping Fish
• The Good Bad-Man
• Regeneration
• Straight Shooting
• Male and Female
• Victory
• When the Clouds Roll By

Foreign Film Industries

German

General Readings - German Expressionism, Murnau, Fritz Lang

Films to Review:

• Metropolis
• Faust
• Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Die Nibelung: Siegfried's Death & Kriemhild's Revenge
• Dr. Mabuse
• The Last Laugh
• Nosferatu
• Diary of a Lost Woman (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen)
• Pandora's Box
• Spies
• Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
• Der Golem
• Hand of Orlac
• Ghosts before Breakfast

French

General Readings - French Impressionism, Abel Gance

Films to Review:

• The Passion of Joan of Arc
• J'Accuse
• Napoleon
• The Wheel
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• Ménilmontant
• The Faithful Heart
• Finis Terrae
• Un Chien Andalou
• Les Vampires
• L'Inhumaine
• Entr'acte
• Ballet Mecanique
• Emak Bakia
• The Seashell and the Clergyman

Soviet

General Readings - Soviet Montage, Propaganda & Film Theory; Eisenstein

Films to Review:

• Man with a Movie Camera
• Battleship Potemkin
• Strike
• October
• The General Line
• By The Law
• The House on Trubnaya
• Kino Eye
• Earth

The Golden Age of Hollywood

General Readings - Synchronous Sound, Talkies, Fall of the Silent Stars; Buster Keaton, Jazz Singer

Films to Review:

Buster Keaton:

• The General
• Sherlock Jr.
• The Camera Man
• One Week
• Steamboat Bill Jr.
• The Navigator
• Seven Chances

Charlie Chaplin:

• City Lights
• Modern Times
• The Gold Rush
• The Kid
• The Great Dictator

Other Classic Silent Film:

• Safety Last!
• Greed
• He Who Gets Slapped
• The Man Who Laughs
• The Phantom of the Opera
• Nanook of the North

Synchronized Sound:

• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• The Jazz Singer
• Melodie der Welt
• The Wind
• Tabu: A Story of the South Sea
• Silly Symphonies, Oswald the Rabbit, Mickey Mouse

Talkies of The 30s

Films to Review:

• I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang
• It Happened One Night
• Freaks
• Duck Soup
• Fury
• Bringing Up Baby
• Stagecoach
• Mr Deeds Goes to Town
• The Scarlet Empress
• The Grand Illusion
• M
• The Rules of the Game
• The 39 Steps
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• The Lady Vanishes
• Scarface
• L'Atalante
• The Thin Man
• Trouble in Paradise
• Make Way for Tomorrow
• Ninotchka
• Holiday
• Only Angels Have Wings
• A Night at the Opera
• You Can't Take It With You
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• Gold Diggers of 1933
• Port of Shadows
• The Roaring Twenties

Monsters:

• Frankenstein
• King Kong
• Black Cat
• Dracula
• Bride of Frankenstein
• Invisible Man
• The Mummy
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The 40s

Ernst Lubitsch, Orson Welles, American World War II Propaganda, National Socialist Propaganda, TechniColor, Wizard of Oz, Snow White;

Genre Studies: Swashbucklers, Westerns, Epics, Noir, Drama, Early Experimental, Musical & Dance, General Readings

Films to Review:

Orson Welles:

• Citizen Kane
• Third Man
• A Matter of Life and Death
• Leave Her to Heaven
• The Lady from Shanghai

TechniColor:

• Wizard of Oz
• Robin Hood
• A Matter of Life and Death
• Leave Her to Heaven
• Rope

Drama:

• Rebecca
• Notorious
• Grapes of Wrath
• Gilda
• Children of Paradise
• How Green Was My Valley
• Now, Voyager

War Romances:

• Casablanca
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• The Best Years of Our Lives
• To Have and Have Not

Noir:

• Double Indemnity
• The Big Sleep
• Maltese Falcon
• Laura
• Shadow of a Doubt
• Spellbound
• Out of the Past
• Mildred Pierce
• The Killers
• The Lost Weekend
• White Heat
• The Heiress
• Nightmare Alley
• Key Largo
• Gaslight

Comedy:

• Philadelphia Story
• To Be Or Not To Be
• Arsenic and Old Lace
• Sullivan's Travels
• Ball of Fire
• Kind Hearts and Coronets
• Shop Around the Corner

Western:

• Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• My Darling Clementine
• Red River
• The Ox-Bow Incident

Musical:

• Meet Me in St. Louis
• The Red Shoes

Experimental:

• Meshes of An Afternoon
• Fireworks

Post-War Japanese Cinema

Jidaigeki - period drama, gendaigeki - contemporary drama, Kaiju, GOJIRA!

1937 - Humanity and Paper Balloons

Sadao Yamanaka

Gosho

Shimazu

Naruse

Ozu vs. Mizoguchi

Kurosawa

• Seven Samurai
• High and Low
• Ikiru
• Throne of Blood
• Yojimbo
• Sanjuro

Kobayashi

• The Human Condition
• Harakiri
• Kwaidan
• Samurai Rebellion

Teshigahara

• Woman in the Dunes
• The Face of Another
• Pitfall

Ozu

• Tokyo Story
• Late Spring
• Tokyo Twilight
• Early Summer
• An Autumn Afternoon

Mizoguchi

• Sansho the Bailiff
• Ugetsu
• Life of Oharu
• The Crucified Lovers

Kaiju

• Godzilla

General Readings

Films to Review:

Postwar Italian Film

Italian Neorealism, Rosselini

General Readings

Films to Review:

Society of the Spectacle

Widescreen

Epic Adventure, Sword & Sandal Films

50s Masculinity (Theme)

Sci Fi and Cold War Paranoia

50s Musicals

Hitchcock & Auteur Theory

Ingmar Bergman

General Readings

Films to Review:

French New Wave

Cahiers du Cinema

Godard

La Jetee

Tati

Auteur Theory

General Readings

Films to Review:

Documentary & Cinéma vérité

General Readings - City Symphonies

Films to Review:

Hollywood Decay, Blockbusters & New Hollywood Cinema: 60s and 70s

lost theatre chains and also had to compete with television; crazy riots and cultural revolution; ticket sales falling;

Exploitation films

Harryhausen

James Bond

Spaghetti Westerns

Youth Adrift (Theme)

American Disillusionment & Vietnam (Theme)

Decay of Cities

White Ethnic American Identity & Masculinity (Theme): Saturday Night Fever

George Lucas: THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars

Mike Nichols

General Readings

Films to Review:

Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws

Kubrick: 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lnyndon, The Shining

Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation

Altman

Mike Nichols: The Graduate

Rocky

Network

Paper Moon

Gates of Heaven

Jeremiah Johnson

Patton

Asian Cinema

Hong Kong Kung Fu vs. Mainland Communist censorship

Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Wong Kar Wai

Indian Film and Bollywood

Decline of Japanese Film Industry, Rise of Anime

General Readings

Films to Review:

The 80s

Dominance of the Blockbuster and the Bankable Star

Home Video

The Multinational Corporation

Advances in Sci Fi

One Liners

General Readings

Films to Review:

Epic Fantasy: Willow, Neverending Story

Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Goonies

Terry Gilliam: Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen

Babette's Feast

Chariots of Fire

The Right Stuff

The Mission

Batman Miyazaki: Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service

True Stories

My Dinner with Andre

The 90s

Indie film

3D special effects

Star led pictures

Coen Brothers: Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy

Tarantino

Jim Jarmusch

Wes Anderson: Bottle Rocket

Illusory Life (Theme): Truman Show, Matrix, Dark City

Sad Office (Theme)

Rom-Com Golden Age

The Phantom Menace

General Readings

Films to Review:

Misery

The Fugitive

Gattaca

Miyazaki: Mononoke, Porco Rosso

Babe

The Remains of the Day

Whit Stillman: Metropolitan, Barcelona, Last Days of Disco

The 00s

The 00s. Looking back, what a vulgar and depressing era for Hollywood. Some good films were made, but mostly dumb fun with very little iconic or psychological power, and year by year shows a decline in visual quality and overall intelligence.

Remakes & Sequelitis

Decline of Star Power

Rotten Tomatoes and the Rise of Online Reviews

Pre-woke Vulgarity Competitions

The Grimdarkening

The Rise of Netflix

Zombies

Superheroes

General Readings

Films to Review:

Christopher Nolan: The Dark Knight

Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood

Coen Brothers: No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man

American Psycho

Pixar: Monster's Inc, Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up

The Harry Potter Films

The Notebook

Sam Raimi Spider Man Films

Napoleon Dynamite

In Bruges

Children of Men

The Road

Singh's The Fall

Shymalan: Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs

Primer