ARTH 569
Film as Art: Cinema in the Weimar Republic Spring 2010
Division I
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Class Details

This seminar will explore the attempt, in Weimar writing on film and film production itself, to raise the status of cinema from a low-brow mass entertainment medium to a visual art form worthy to stand alongside traditional painting. As the critic Rudolf Arnheim argued in Film als Kunst (1931), “in film one continues to work with the means and devices of traditional art, [and] one can speak just as seriously about Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, editing, and panning as one does about Titian, Cézanne, Baroque, and pleinairism.” Among directors, F. W. Murnau studied art history at university, Fritz Lang began as a painter and sculptor in Vienna; they and other filmmakers availed themselves of the services of painters and established architects for the creation of film sets. The seminar will focus precisely on this constitution of film as a primarily visual medium in which, to paraphrase Arnheim, the most profound content was conveyed by light, framing, physiognomy, and editing, against which the word and the often kitschy or hackneyed story line remained secondary. While the primary focus of the seminar will be the work of German directors, we shall also examine the work of filmmakers of other nationalities who were passionately committed to raising film to the level of high art: for example, the Russian Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin was a major cinema event in Germany, and the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, who directed three films there. Topics to be examined include: “Expressionism” in film, Weimar film theory and criticism, the physiognomic paradigm, the transition from silent film to sound film, as well as case studies of specific films. During the first half of the semester there will be weekly readings in English with occasional short source readings in German, hence a reading knowledge of German is desirable but not required.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 12
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: students will be responsible for an oral report, to be presented in revised, written form at semester's end, and a 10-minute critical commentary on another student's oral report
Prerequisites: reading knowledge of German desirable but not required
Enrollment Preferences: Graduate Program students then to senior Art History majors
Distributions: Division I

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