Film

This module offers a range of approaches to the cinema, focusing not on the small number of movies and directors that critics consider great but on what André Bazin calls ?the genius of the system.? The cinema has had numerous manifestations in its approximately 115-year lifespan, the most powerful and influential of which has been the U.S. cinema identified with Hollywood. Often called the dream factory, Hollywood developed by the 1920s a kind of conveyor-belt system to produce fantasies for mass consumption both at home and abroad. To safeguard its success, it has been anxious to put in place and maintain textual and extra-textual systems by which it could reproduce itself as a benign purveyor of harmless entertainment. In order to gain an understanding of dominant cinema, this course will employ formal, historical and theoretical methodologies in its focus on how the factory operates and the nature of the dreams it produces. An important part of the course will be the screening of films that typify aspects of the historical development of Hollywood. The module will seek to foster an interpretive community ? an audience ? with the ability to engage with movies critically. Lectures will be accompanied by a series of compulsory screenings.