Lobby B | ENGL 212: Cinema: History & Criticism

2/22 – 2/27: FILM REALISM and THEORY

Touch of Evil (dir. Orson Welles, 1958) – opening shot, director’s cut

Touch of Evil – opening shot, Universal’s cut

The Daily Beast: “Gravity and Film’s Eight Best Long Takes”

2/29 – 3/12: POST WWII EUROPEAN CINEMA I: ITALIAN NEOREALISM

Trailer for Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, dir. Marcel Carné, 1939). Compare this film to Bicycle Thieves (dir. Vittoria De Sica, 1948). Bazin, p. 49: Bicycle Thieves “shows no extraordinary events such as those which befall the fated workers in Gabin films.”

Martin Scorsese on Vittorio De Sica and Neorealism

3/14 – 3/21: POST WWII EUROPEAN CINEMA II: THE FRENCH NEW WAVE
Opening of François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973) – Truffaut playing a version of himself, the director Ferrand

Wes Anderson on François Truffaut

Dudley Andrew, Professor of Film Studies, Yale University, on the 1968 Cannes Film Festival

Jump cut sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) — see Cook, Chapter 13 pp. 353-354

Long take (or “sequence shot”) from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) — see Cook, Chapter 13, top of p. 351

Seven years later, for his film Weekend (1967), Godard gives a radical critique of the long take’s “realism” with the traffic jam sequence.

“A minute of silence,” from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964).

“The Madison,” from Bande à part

Quentin Tarantino’s homage to Godard’s Bande à part.

Quentin Tarantino on Godard’s influence on him

Jean-Luc Godard’s Un femme est one femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961). Godard called this film “a neorealist musical–that is, a contradiction in terms.”

Richard Brody on the life and work of Jean-Luc Godard

3/26 – 4/2: IMAGES OF WOMEN IN FILM

Laura Mulvey, on the 40th anniversary of the publication of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”–see especially minute 14:00 on

Fetishistic scopophilia and the male gaze–example from the opening credits of A Guide for the Married Man (dir. Gene Kelly, 1967). See Mulvey, p. 837.