Class Outline

Syllabus: online at http://www.shaviro.com/Classes/FilmIntro.html

Technologies of film

• Precursors of film (19th century)
• Invention of still photography (Niépce, 1826; Daguerre, 1839)
• Motion studies through multiple stills (Eadweard Muybridge, 1872)
• Edison's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope (1893)
• Moving Images: camera and projector (since 1895)
• Tools for Editing and Postproduction (after 1900)
• Adding Sound (since 1927)
• Television and Video (since the mid-1940s)
• Digital Technologies (since the 1980s)

The Filmmaking Process

• Production
• Pre-production: planning the film, getting the resources together
• Production: actually shooting the film
• Post-production: editing the film, putting together images and sounds
• Distribution
• Getting the film into theaters (and video stores)
• Release patterns: wide vs. limited release
• Video release on DVD
• Availability of film (legally or illegally) on the Internet
• Marketing and Promotion
• Advertising campaigns
• Product tie-ins
• Visibility of stars/celebrities
• Exhibition
• Movie theaters: 35mm
• Video projection
• Home video
• Streaming on Internet
• Portable screens

Formal Elements of Film

• Mise-en-scène
  (What's in front of the camera)
• Cinematography
  (What the camera does)
• Editing
  (How the shots of a film are put together)
• Sound
  (Film is more than images)

Ways of Understanding Film

• Film Narrative
  (How films tell stories)
• Film Genres
  (What kind of film is it?)
• Film Histories
  (From 1895 to today)
• Theories of Film
  (What a film means, and how)

Structure of Class Sessions

• Screening of feature film
• Lecture: analysis of the film
• Lecture: analysis of concepts
• Application: use of concepts to analyze another film sequence (discussion and/or writing exercise).

Class Requirements

• Regular attendance is mandatory (counts for 10% of grade)
• Five in-class writing exercises (counts for 40% of grade)
  • You must do at least four of the five exercises
  • Each exercise counts for 10% of grade
  • If you do all five exercises, your lowest grade will be dropped
• Midterm short paper, 2-3 pages (counts for 20% of grade)
• Final examination (counts for 30% of grade)

Class Reference Material

Available online:

• Concept Guides
• Lecture Notes
• Study Questions on individual films

Optional Outside Reading

Textbooks:

Buster Keaton, Sherlock Junior (1924)

• Silent Film Comedy of the 1920s
• Career of Buster Keaton
• A film about filmviewing: the film-within-a-film
• Filmviewing and detective work
• How are desire and fantasy refracted through filmviewing?

Sherlock Junior: Before

• Significance of money
• Keaton's object-machines
• Sticky paper
• Banana peel
• Detective manual: shadow your suspect, etc.
• Comedy of reducing the human to mechanical duplication (Henri Bergson)

Sherlock Junior: The Film-Within-the-Film

• Film is like a dream
• Projection of everyday reality into the world of the film
• Buster's elegant, and supremely capable, self-image in the film vs. his awkwardness in 'real life'
• But the realm of film has strange rules of its own: a different time and space

Film Space:
The laws of association

• Scenes continually change behind Buster
• Altering the properties of space
• Going through the mirror
• Safe opening onto street
• Chase sequences
• Reaction shots and narration (billiards scene)
• Object-machines (e.g. Buster's motorcycle)

Sherlock Junior: After

• Disconnect of film from reality (the Girl -- and not Buster -- solves the case)
• Filmviewing and self-absorption
• Buster can't see that she loves him all along
• Romantic cliches taken from films
• The ending
• Life imitates film, rather that the reverse
• Solving the "mystery" of sexuality

Concepts and Questions

• How are we 'drawn in' to the world of the film?
• The thrill of recognition
• Identification with characters
• Enjoyment of situations (comedy, spectacle)
• Narrative: the need for resolution
• How do films work to allure us?
• Concreteness of the cinematic world
• Dreamlike fluidiy of space, time, and association
• Guiding our attention
• Fantasy fulfillment
• Film captures and reproduces elements of reality...
• ...But film is never truly "realistic"