Sat, Sep 24, 2011
The Story of Film looks at the films of the 1930s and the development of "talking pictures". Sound requires the use of sound stages and this effects lighting and cinematography. It looks at Rouben Mamoulian's musical Love Me Tonight. It looks at the development of film genres in Hollywood: horror films, gangster films, musicals, westerns, comedies, and animated cartoons. It then looks overseas to look at the work of French filmmakers (Jean Cocteau, Jean Vigo, Marcel Carne, Jean Renoir), South American filmmakers (Mário Peixoto), Poland (Stefan and Franciszka Themerson), Germany (Leni Riefenstahl), and England (Hitchcock).
Sat, Oct 1, 2011
The Story of Film examines world cinema in the period of 1939-1952 looks at film-making during and immediately after World War II. Hollywood films shift away from soft focus and begin to use the techniques of deep staging and deep focus as in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and Orson Wells's Citizen Kane (1941). It then looks at Italian Neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica before examining the development of Film Noir in the films of Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and Ida Lupino. American films grow more serious though romantic film remain popular. In the late 40's, American cinema is investigated for communist activities and producers, actors, and directors are blacklisted. Meanwhile in Britain, Carol Reed creates the Noir classic The Third Man (1949)
Sat, Oct 15, 2011
The Story of Film examines European cinema in the period of 1957-1964. It first looks at the works of influential directors Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Federico Fellini. It examines the French New Wave Movement including the work of Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard). It then looks at New Wave filmmakers in Italy (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Leone, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni). Finally, it looks at the New Wave directors in Spain (Marco Ferreri, Luis Buñuel) and Sweden (Vilgot Sjöman).
Sat, Oct 29, 2011
The Story of Film examines American cinema in the period of 1967-1979 also known as New American Cinema. Films of this time generally fell into three types: satirical films that mocked society and the times, dissident films that challenged the conventional style of cinema, and assimilationist films that rework old studio genres with new techniques. Satirical films include the work of Frank Tashlin, Buck Henry, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, and Milos Forman. Dissident films include the work of Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Charles Burnett, and Woody Allen. Assimilationist films include the work of Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Peckinpah, and Terrence Malick. It also looks at the assimilationist classics Cabaret (1972), The Godfather (1972), and Chinatown (1974).
Sat, Oct 22, 2011
The Story of Film examines world cinema in the period of 1965-1969 when New Wave Cinema swept the world and gave rise to a whole new generation of filmmakers. It first looks at the work of director Roman Polanski before turning to Czech filmmakers Jiri Trnka, Milos Forman, and Vera Chytilova, It then looks at directors in Hungary (Miklos Jancso), the Soviet Union (Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov), Japan (Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura), India (Ritwik Ghatak), Brazil (Glauber Rocha), Iran (Forugh Farrokhzad), and Senegal (Ousmane Sembene). It also examines director in England including Karel Reisz, Ken Loach, and Richard Lester. Finally it turns to America and a growing movement of innovative film-makers in the late 60s including Robert Drew, John Cassavetes, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Haskell Wexler, Dennis Hopper, and Stanley Kubrick.
Sat, Dec 10, 2011
The Story of Film looks at film in the 2000's and considers innovations that will drive film forward to the future. It looks at the work of documentary filmmakers like Michael Moore, Nicolas Philibert, Douglas Gordon, and Philippe Parreno. It also looks at filmmakers inspired by documentaries and realism including Paul Greengrass and Andrew Dominik,. It also looks at contemporary film around the world including Turkey (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Romania (Cristi Puiu), Argentina (Lucrecia Martel), Mexico (Carlos Reygadas), Korea (Lee Chang-Dong, Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook), the United States (David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, James Cameron), Sweden (Roy Andersson), Canada (Roger Avary), Thailand (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and Russia (Alexander Sokurov). An epilogue considers the future of film-making and discusses Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
Sat, Nov 26, 2011
The Story of Film looks at world cinema in the period of 1990-1998 the waning days of the celluloid era and the birth of the digital age. It first looks at the cinema of Asia and filmmakers in Iran (Samira Makhmalbaf, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Abbas Kiarostami), China (Wong Kar-wai), Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Japan (Shinya Tsukamoto, Hideo Nakata, and Takashi Miike), Denmark (Lars von Trier), France (Mathieu Kassovitz, Bruno Dumont, and Claire Denis), Belgium (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne), Poland (Dorota Kedzierzawska), Russia (Viktor Kossakovsky), and Austria (Michael Haneke).