Film History Classes:
San Francisco Conservatory of Music:
General Education 504: Film History and Appreciation, Spring 2012
City College of San Francisco:
Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Studies 11: History of Homosexuality in Film, Summer 2011
General Education 504: Film History and Appreciation
Course Information / Spring 2012
Film and moving images are pervasive and popular in today’s world, that we may forget the potential they hold for study as history, commerce, art, propaganda, and, of course, escapist entertainment. With an emphasis on the American film industry, this survey class explores the history of film with a critical eye toward genres, aesthetics, and production through the study of photography, sound, editing, writing, acting, directing, and other key elements that go into making movies.
Class Topics and Screenings:
Introduction
Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, Part I: Where It All Began (England, 1996, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, 60 min.)
The Silent Film Comedy
Short: The Life and Death of 9413 A Hollywood Extra (USA, 1928, 13 minutes)
The General (USA, 1927, Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 74 min.)
Photography, Mise en Scène, and German Expressionism
Clips: Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Gosford Park (2001)
The Blue Angel (Germany, 1930, Josef von Sternberg, 106 min.)
Ideology, French Social Satire, and Class Struggles
Clip: Gold Diggers of 1933
Boudu Saved From Drowning (France, 1932, Jean Renoir, 84 min.)
Sound, Drama, and the Musical
Clip: Pickup on South Street (1953)
Footlight Parade (USA, 1933, Lloyd Bacon, 104 min.)
The Auteur
Citizen Kane (USA, 1941, Orson Welles, 119 min.)
Film Noir
Double Indemnity (USA, 1944, Billy Wilder, 107 min.)
Critique and Italian Postwar Neorealism
Short: Rabbit of Seville (USA, 1950, 7 min.)
Bicycle Thieves (Italy, 1948, Vittorio De Sica, 89 min.)
Movement, Subjectivity and Film
Clip: An American in Paris (1951)
Rashomon (Japan, 1950, Akira Kurosawa, 88 min.)
Horror and Paranoia
Short: Eaux d’Artifice (USA, 1953, 13 min.)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA, 1956, Don Siegel, 80 min.)
Acting Styles, Consumerism, and Modernity
Clips: Annie Hall (1977) and Away from Her (2007)
Good Morning (Japan, 1959, Yasujiro Ozu, 93 min.)
Editing and New Freedom
Clips: Battleship Potemkin (1925) and West Side Story (1961)
Bonnie and Clyde (USA, 1967, Arthur Penn, 111 min.)
Writing for the Love of Movies
Clip: North by Northwest (1959)
Day for Night (La Nuit Américaine) (France, 1973, François Truffaut, 115 minutes)
Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Studies 11: History of Homosexuality in Film
Course Information / Summer 2011
LGBT 11 examines queer representation in American film from the silent era to the mid-1980s. Beginning with the silent gender-reversing comedy A Florida Enchantment (1914) and finishing with the elegiac Parting Glances (1986), we look at films not only as representing social assumptions of non-normative sexual desire, but as giving voice and coherence to them as well.
Class Topics and Screenings:
Introduction - The Legacy of Vito Russo
The Celluloid Closet (1995, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman)
The Entangling of Gender and Desire
Early Hollywood, ancient representations of race and gender
A Florida Enchantment (1914, Sidney Drew) and The Clinging Vine (1926, Paul Sloane)
Flesh and the Devil (and the Pansy)
Being queer in Hollywood, talkies, morality, the Great Depression
Lot in Sodom (1933, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber) and Top Hat (1935, Mark Sandrich)
Connotative Homosexuality
The Production Code, the studio system, the woman’s director, queer icon Bette Davis
The Great Lie (1941, Edmund Goulding) and Fireworks (1947, Kenneth Anger)
Hiding in Plain Sight: A Clifton Webb Double Bill
World War II and after, male homosexual representations
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger) and Sitting Pretty (1948, Walter Lang)
That Wascally Wabbit and Women Behind Bars
The Paramount Case, female homosexual representations
What’s Up, Doc (1950, Robert McKimson), The Rabbit of Seville (1950, Chuck Jones), Water Water Every Hare (1950, Chuck Jones) and Caged (1950, John Cromwell)
‘50s Style Perversions
McCarthyism, Christine Jorgensen, transgender sympathies, homoeroticism in the military
Glen or Glenda (Ed Wood, 1953) and The Strange One (Jack Garfein, 1957)
The Love That Whispers Its Name
Loosening of the Code, Victim, homosexuality gets prestige, commodifying queer fetishes
The Children’s Hour (1961, William Wyler) and Scorpio Rising (1964, Kenneth Anger)
High and Low Dykesploitation
The British Invasion goes queer, Vietnam, the rating system, an industry in crisis, new freedoms
Chained Girls, etc. (dykesploitation trailers, 1965-1969) and The Killing of Sister George (1968, Robert Aldrich)
A Gathering of the Tribe
Stonewall, the feminist movements, porno chic, Wakefield Poole, corporate Hollywood
The Boys in the Band (1970, William Friedkin)
Trash and Class
Bad taste, film and gay liberation, Cruising, the “Great Hollywood Gay-Movie Caper,” old fashioned romance with a new twist
Female Trouble (1974, John Waters) and Desert Hearts (1985, Donna Deitch)
Parting Glances
AIDS, Rock Hudson, the promise of New Queer Cinema
Parting Glances (1986, Bill Sherwood)
