ENGL 262
European Cinema and Film Theory Fall 2023
Division I Writing Skills
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This seminar explores the foundations of contemporary European cinema by studying a range of films from 1920-1985, and offers a grounding in film theory and aesthetics by pairing such films with theoretical essays by philosophers and aestheticians from the silent era through the 1970s. We will establish a kind of map of cinematic styles and movements, ranging from German expressionism and Soviet montage in silent films of the 1920s, through French realism of the prewar and Italian neorealism of the early postwar era, to the insurrectionary films of the French New Wave and the stylistic innovations of the German New Wave and of Swedish cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. We will study films by such directors as Wiene, Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Vertov, Dreyer, Renoir, Riefenstahl, Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Herzog, Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Almodóvar.