Introduction to Film History I

“Introduction to Film History I” aims to provide a general mapping of main figures, movements, and trends within global filmmaking from its beginnings in the late 19^th Century until the immediate aftermath of WWII. While taking note of the different socio-historical contexts in which this practice operates, the classes will situate cinema of the period in relation to the tension between the popular and the avantgarde, to changes in its technological infrastructure, and to the efforts of forming a relationship between the national and the transnational at a time of great upheaval. Amongst the topics discussed within this framework: the development of early film from attractions to narrative structures; the formation of Hollywood’s classic language at the end of the silent era; cinematic modernism in France, Germany and the USSR of the 1920s; the transition into sound and the establishment of the Hollywood studio system; French Poetic Realism; propaganda and cinema in Germany, the USSR, and the US ahead of WWII; the rise of Italian Neo-Realism; and art cinema in pre-New Wave France and Britain.