History of Cinema—The Auteurs

Course Description
This course is a survey of fourteen major film auteurs from the advent of cinema in 1895 to the present. An auteur is an artist, usually a film director, who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work; in other words, a person equivalent to an author of a novel or a play. Progressing chronologically, the course builds an overall view of auteur theory across cultures, considering film criticism, as well as analyzing the styles of major auteurs. Students will also become familiar with key concepts in film studies including realism, expressionism, montage, mise en scene, and genre. As students acquire a better familiarity with cinematic history and the developments in film criticism, they will become better prepared to form surer and sounder judgments about their own film experiences and to speak and write about those judgments with greater clarity and skill.

Course Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate a familiarity with the major movements in film theory and criticism with respect to the various modes of inquiry that have impacted the study of film.
• Demonstrate a basic familiarity with key concepts in cinema studies.
• Demonstrate a familiarity with a body of films and the ways in which they can be understood and contextualized with respect to the literature that defines film theory and criticism.
• Apply critical and analytic tools essentialfor film scholarship and related fields of aesthetic inquiry grounded in a familiarity with the critical literature on film.