HISTORY OF ART AND FILM
HA1007: Reading Film
Semester 1: 2014/15
Professor James Chapman
INTRODUCTION TO THE MODULE
Reading Film is a Level 1 film studies module intended to introduce you to the techniques
and skills of formal and visual analysis of film texts. The module is based on close readings
of ten films that are all part of the film studies canon. Our discussion of the films will be
informed by critical literature that exemplifies several of the major theoretical approaches to
the study of film, including aesthetics, formalism, authorship, genre and psychoanalysis.
Part I focuses on ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’. Classical Hollywood is the dominant mode
of film practice in the history of the medium and an understanding of its formal properties
and narrative codes is essential for any film degree. We will consider films by major directors
such as Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), John Ford (The Searchers) and Orson Welles
(Citizen Kane), and examples of the Hollywood melodrama (Casablanca) and the musical
(Singin’ in the Rain) that represent different variations on the classical model.
Part II, ‘Alternatives to Classical Hollywood’, considers five examples of films that ALL, in
their different ways, illustrate different formal and aesthetic characteristics to the classical
paradigm. There are three examples of distinctive national cinemas - French Poetic Realism
(La Grande Illusion), British ‘quality’ cinema (Brief Encounter) and the French ‘new wave’
(A bout de soufflé) - and two films by auteur directors (Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal
and Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour) that belong to the tradition of ‘art cinema’. These offer us
ways of ‘reading’ a film that take into account different narrative and stylistic features. For
example, it is sometimes suggested that European cinemas offer more psychologically
realistic characterisations and that their narratives are more ‘open’ than Hollywood films.
Teaching
Lectures/screenings will be on Mondays 14.00-17.00 in the University Film Theatre (in the
basement of the Attenborough Seminar Block).
Seminars will be on Tuesdays.
Group A: Tuesday 10.00-11.00: ATT 214
Group B: Tuesday 12.00-13.00: FJ SW SR2
Group C: Tuesday 13.00-14.00: FJ L17
Group D: Tuesday 15.00-16.00: FJ SW SR1
Group E: Tuesday 16.00-17.00: FJ L17
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Attendance
It is the policy of the Department of History of Art and Film to make attendance at all lectures,
screenings and seminars compulsory. In our experience there is a direct correlation between
attendance and performance. Whether or not you inform your tutor beforehand, it is a matter of
urgency that you complete the online absence form which can be found at:
https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/arthistory/staffandstudents/absences .
Completion of this form will inform the office and your tutor of the circumstances of your absence.
Illness lasting more than 5 days must be supported by a doctor’s note or other medical evidence.
Registers are taken at classes and persistent offenders will be issued with a warning for neglect of
studies, which will result in disciplinary action and may even lead to the termination of your course.
Assessment
The module is assessed by two essays of 2000 words each. You must achieve a minimum
mark of 40 for each essay in order to pass the module.
Essay 1 (50%): To be submitted by 12.00 on Friday 7 November 2014.
Essay 2 (50%): To be submitted by 12.00 on Friday 12 December 2014.
It is important that you submit assignments on time: this is to enable tutors to plan their time
for marking large amounts of coursework. Work submitted late without good reason will be
subject to a late submission penalty and marks will be deducted. Please note that ‘I couldn’t
find any books in the library because they were all out’ is not a good reason!
Set books
There is one set book for this module: Jeffrey Geiger and R. L Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A
Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). This includes critical essays by leading
film studies scholars on 44 films, including six of the films included in this module, focusing
on close textual analysis. It is also the set book for the second semester module HA1114
Realism and the Cinema.
Course reader
There is also a course reader for this module, consisting of ten critical readings - either
journal articles or book chapters - chosen to complement each week’s films. The reader is
available from the School Office (Room 1514). Please ensure that you collect your copy
otherwise you will need to source the readings yourself. (Note that these may not all be
available in the University Library.)
Further reading
Each week’s programme includes an annotated bibliography of suggested further reading.
While you are not expected to read everything on these lists, it should go without saying that
you should make every effort to read as widely as possible around the subject - especially
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when it comes to the preparation of your essays. The bibliographies are not exhaustive: one
of the skills you will develop throughout your degree course is how to conduct bibliographic
searches of your own. You should use them as a guide to help you in constructing your own
further reading schedule: remember that the bulk of your time on this module (and on most
others for that matter) is spent on independent study.
Further viewing
I have also included a few suggestions for other films to watch in connection to each week’s
‘set film’. Again it should go without saying that you should make every effort to watch as
many films as possible, not just for study but also for the intrinsic pleasure it brings. There
are viewing facilities in the University Library and in the College of Arts, Humanities and
Law Multimedia Suite in the Attenborough Seminar Block.
Contacts
If you have any academic queries concerning the module, contact Professor James Chapman
either by email (jrc28@le.ac.uk) or in person (Attenborough Tower 1713). Please see the
departmental notice board on the 17th Floor of Attenborough for my office hours.
Learning outcomes
All modules have stated ‘learning outcomes’: these represent the knowledge and skills that
you should have acquired by the end of the module. Learning outcomes are assessed through
the various assessment components: if you pass the module you will be deemed to have
achieved these outcomes.
By completing the module, including all its assessment components, you should be able to:

Analyse the formal properties of a narrative film, including its structure, narration, editing
and mise-en-scène.

Apply the principles of textual analysis both to different film texts.

Understand the basics of the main approaches to film analysis such as formalism,
authorship, structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Demonstrate competence in writing critically about film.
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SCREENINGS
The module is taught over ten weeks.
All lectures/screenings will be in the University Film Theatre on Mondays 14.00-17.00.
Part I: Classical Hollywood Cinema
Monday 6 October: Rear Window (USA, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
Monday 13 October: The Searchers (USA, dir. John Ford, 1956)
Monday 20 October: Citizen Kane (USA, dir. Orson Welles, 1941)
Monday 27 October: Casablanca (USA, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Monday 3 November: Singin’ in the Rain (USA, dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952)
Part II: Alternatives to Classical Hollywood
Monday 10 November: La Grande Illusion (France, dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)
Monday 17 November: Brief Encounter (Great Britain, dir. David Lean, 1945)
Monday 24 November: The Seventh Seal (Sweden, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1956)
Monday 1 December: A bout de soufflé (France, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960
Monday 8 December: Belle de Jour (France/Italy, dir. Luis Buñuel, 1967)
Please ensure that you arrive promptly for all lectures and screenings.
As a courtesy to others, the use of mobile phones is strictly prohibited during all
lectures and screenings, including sending and receiving text messages.
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1. REAR WINDOW (1954)
Alfred Hitchcock is possibly the most significant film-maker, if not for the history of film,
then certainly for the history of film studies: most of the theoretical approaches to film that
have emerged in the academy over the last forty years or so have arisen from engagement
with Hitchcock’s films. The critical literature on Hitchcock’s films therefore represents a
paradigm of the intellectual history of the discipline.
Rear Window is one of Hitchcock’s most popular films, the first he made for Paramount
Pictures in the 1950s where he enjoyed a great degree of creative autonomy in his choice and
treatment of subjects. It provides an ideal introduction to ‘reading’ film on account of its
exemplary use of film form and technique and Hitchcock’s mastery of mise-en-scène. It
exemplifies what Hitchcock called ‘pure cinema’: the idea that a story in film could be told in
purely visual terms. It is a film that revolves around the act of looking and therefore is a ripe
subject for understanding the mechanics of point-of-view: Hitchcock’s films tend to be more
fullsome than most others in their insistence upon optical subjectivity.
We will consider Rear Window as an example of Hitchcock’s ‘mature’ period and will focus
especially on its editing. But we will also consider how the film addresses themes such as
voyeurism and spectatorship. To this extent the film has often been claimed as being ‘about’
the mechanics of the cinematic apparatus itself. In so far as it also, apparently, invites us not
only to look but, moreover, to look in a gender-specific way, Rear Window also makes for a
useful introduction to feminist critiques of classical Hollywood cinema.
Set reading
Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Rear Window Ethics’, in Film Analysis, pp.475-93.
Item 1 in the Course Reader: Tania Modleski, ‘The Master’s Dollhouse: Rear Window’, The
Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (NY: Methuen, 1988), pp.7385.
Further viewing
Hitchcock’s American films are readily available on DVD and VHS. Vertigo (1958) makes a
useful comparison with Rear Window for its systematic use of point-of-view (see especially
the BFI ‘Film Classic’ on Vertigo by Charles Barr). Lifeboat (1944) and Dial M for Murder
(1953) are other films where Hitchcock confined himself to a small set - saying that he liked
the technical challenge - while Rope (1948) exemplifies a different style of narration in its
use of long takes rather than montage. Psycho (1960) remains probably the classic Hitchcock
film, even if its moments of shock and surprise have become familiar to us all. And that’s
before we’ve considered Strangers on a Train (1951), The Trouble With Harry (1955), The
Wrong Man (1956), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963) or Marnie (1964) …
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Further reading
There is an extensive critical literature on Hitchcock, including no less than three books on
Rear Window itself:
Belton, John (ed.), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000)
Fawell, John, Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film (Chicago: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2004)
Sharff, Stefan, The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (New York:
Limelight Editions, 1997)
The classic auteurist studies of Hitchcock include:
Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, trans.
Stanley Hochman (New York: Continuum, 1988)
Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films (London: Tantivy Press, 1965). See also Wood’s
revised version Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (London: Faber and Faber, 1991)
There are several useful collections of critical essays including:
Allen, Richard, and S. Ishii Gonzalès (eds), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays
(London: British Film Institute, 1999)
Detelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Iowa: Iowa
State University Press, 1986)
For feminist critiques of Hitchcock see:
Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
(New York: Methuen, 1988)
Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989)
The best historical study of Hitchcock’s career is:
Kapsis, Robert E., Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992)
And the most recent - and most balanced - biography of the director is:
McGilligan, Patrick, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (London: John
Wiley & Sons, 2003)
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2. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
John Ford is widely recognised as one of the ‘greats’ of American cinema with a directorial
career spanning nearly fifty years. His style of direction is very different from Hitchcock’s: in
particular he draws far less attention to the camera and prefers to shoot in an unobtrusive way
in contrast to Hitchcock’s flaunting of his own authorship. Yet Ford is also recognised as an
auteur for the thematic and formal consistency of his films and, in particular, for his mastery
of the Western genre - the genre that André Bazin called ‘the American film par excellence’.
The Searchers is a Western from Ford’s ‘mature’ period and is regarded as a masterpiece of
the genre. It demonstrates all the themes that we commonly associate with the Western: the
frontier, the relationship between the individual and society and the paradigms of Garden and
Desert that structure the Western narrative. It is also notable for its beautiful Technicolor
cinematography of Monument Valley (a location that Ford returned to time and again in his
Westerns). At the same time The Searchers is a more adult Western than mere ‘cowboys and
Indians’ and is notable, in particular, for its treatment of racism and miscegenation.
We will consider the structure of The Searchers as a narrative. Film theorists such as David
Bordwell and Raymond Bellour write of ‘symmetry’ in film narratives: the idea that films
come full circle and that the end answers the beginning. The narrative of The Searchers lends
itself to this method of analysis, not least in the famous opening and closing shots. We will
also consider Ford’s economical style of direction - described as ‘poetic’ or ‘lyrical’ by
critics such as Lindsay Anderson - and his masterful use of mise-en-scène.
Set reading
Item 2 in the Course Reader: Arthur M. Eckstein, ‘Darkening Ethan: John Ford’s The
Searchers (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Film’, Cinema Journal, vol.38 no.1 (1998),
pp.3-25.
Further viewing
Ford’s œuvre provides an embarrassment of riches for the film enthusiast. His Westerns alone
include half a dozen that are among the finest examples of the genre: Stagecoach (1939), My
Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagonmaster (1950) and The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) all share The Searchers’ thematic concerns with
frontier mythology. But Ford was far more than just a director of Westerns, as demonstrated
by films such as The Informer (1935), Young Mr Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), How Green Was My Valley (1942), They Were Expendable (1945), The Quiet Man
(1952) and Mister Roberts (1955). Interestingly, although Ford won four Academy Awards
for Best Director, more than anyone else has ever done, none of them were for his Westerns:
The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man.
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Further reading
Again there is an extensive critical literature, including two books on The Searchers itself:
Buscombe, Edward, The Searchers (London: British Film Institute, 2000)
Eckstein, Arthur M. and Peter Mehman (eds), The Searchers: Essays & Reflections on
John Ford’s Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).
Screen Education devoted a special issue to The Searchers: copies of these articles can be
found in the dossier on the film available for consultation in the HAF Slide Room.
The best critical studies of studies of John Ford are:
Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1981)
‘Dossier on John Ford’ in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp.68-120.
McBride, Joseph, Searching for John Ford (London: Faber and Faber, 2004)
Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974)
The Searchers is a key point of reference in studies of the western genre. The literature is
vast, but see in particular:
Buscombe, Edward (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western (London: Andre
Deutsch/ British Film Institute, 1988)
Buscombe, Edward, and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New
Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1999)
Cameron, Ian, and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London:
Studio Vista, 1996)
Coyne, Michael, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood
Western (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997)
Kitses, Jim, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood
(London: British Film Institute, 2004).
Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975)
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3. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Citizen Kane might just be the most famous film in cinema history and is certainly the one
most often afforded the accolade of ‘best film ever made’. To understand why this is, we
need to consider what it is that makes Citizen Kane so special. The circumstances of its
production were unique: Orson Welles was given almost carte blanche by a studio (RKO
Radio Pictures) that sought prestige in the film industry. The ‘biographical legend’ of Welles
- that he was a genius whose talent was not recognised by the philistine world of Hollywood
and was doomed to spend the rest of his career travelling the world as a peripatetic filmmaker and jobbing actor - further enhances the special status of Citizen Kane.
Most critical discussion of Citizen Kane focuses on its formal properties, especially its use of
long takes coupled with deep-focus cinematography. Yet, as David Bordwell has suggested,
the best way to understand Citizen Kane is ‘to stop worshipping it as a triumph of technique’.
It exemplifies a highly complex narrative structure that is unusual for classical Hollywood
and, arguably, closer to the traditions of European ‘art cinema’ that emerged after the Second
World War. To this extent Citizen Kane’s major significance may have been its influence on
other film-makers. Andre Sarris, for example, called it ‘the work that influenced the cinema
more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation’.
Citizen Kane also provides a test case for the auteur theory: the idea that the director is the
main, even the sole, creative influence in the film-making process. In the early 1970s the
outspoken film critic Pauline Kael averred that Welles’s role in shaping the film had been
exaggerated (principally by Welles himself) and that much of the credit belonged to co-writer
Herman J. Manciewicz. This claim sparked a bitter controversy that raged for many years.
Set reading
James Naremore, ‘The Magician and the Media’, in Film Analysis, pp.341-360.
Item 3 in the Course Reader: Peter Wollen, ‘Introduction to Citizen Kane’, from Readings
and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp.49-62.
Further viewing
Welles’s career after Kane was fragmented and unfulfilled. He completed one more film for
RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was heavily re-edited by the studio before
release (see the BFI ‘Film Classic’ by V.F. Perkins), and thereafter was employed only
occasionally by Hollywood as a writer-director. The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch
of Evil (1958) are two superior examples of film noir that both reward investigation, while his
Shakespearean adaptations Macbeth (1949), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1965)
exemplify different methods of adapting the Bard in cinema.
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Further reading
Unsurprisingly there is a great deal of critical literature on ‘the best film ever made’: a range
of articles can be found in the dossier in the HAF Slide Room for a start. Otherwise a good
introduction to reading Citizen Kane is provided by the BFI ‘Film Classics’ series:
Mulvey, Laura, Citizen Kane (London: British Film Institute, 1992)
The controversy over the authorship of Kane is aired in:
Kael, Pauline (ed.), The Citizen Kane Book (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971)
Most of Kael’s charges against Welles are rebutted in a detailed empirical study of the film’s
production history based on the studio archives:
Carringer, Robert L, The Making of ‘Citizen Kane’ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996 rev. edn.)
For discussion of Welles’s relationship with the Hollywood studio system, see:
Heylin, Clinton, Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios
(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005)
Schatz, Thomas, History of the American Cinema Volume 6. Boom and Bust:
American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
There is surprisingly little good critical material on Welles himself (in contrast to, say,
Hitchcock) and the best tends to be quite old, such as:
Bazin, André, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991).
(First published in 1972 by Les Editions du Cerf, Paris.)
Bazin’s critical ideas about realism can be traced through his influential essays:
Bazin, André, What is Cinema? 2 vols, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967 & 1971)
An interesting comparative study of Welles and two other directors covered in this module is:
Singer, Irving, Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005)
And two biographies of Welles from contrasting perspectives:
Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (New York: Anchor, 1990)
Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995)
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4. CASABLANCA (1942)
Casablanca is widely regarded as one of the ‘classic’ Hollywood movies, though unlike the
preceding three films it does not feature prominently in the ‘masterpiece tradition’ of film
history. This is largely because Casablanca is seen very much as a studio film - a result of the
production strategies of Warner Bros. - rather than as an unusual or unique production in the
manner of a Citizen Kane. Moreover, its director Michael Curtiz is regarded as a journeyman
rather than a great artist: or, to use the terms of the polemical French critical journal Cahiers
du Cinéma, as a metteur-en-scène rather than an auteur. Its critical standing has not been
helped by remarks such as Pauline Kael’s ‘the best bad film ever made’.
More recently, however, film historians have claimed Casablanca as an example of what
André Bazin called ‘the genius of the system’. We will consider the extent to which
Casablanca is a paradigm of the classical Hollywood style. How far does it illustrate the
potentials and limitations of classical form and narrative? We will also look at the question of
‘studio style’ by comparing Casablanca to contemporaneous films from other studios. It has
been argued, for example, that the films of Warner Bros. exhibited a distinctive ‘look’, a
visual style determined partly by stylistic choices but also by economic considerations that is
different from the rather more sumptuous sets and costumes of, say, Paramount or M-G-M.
To this extent we will relate film style to the institutional mode of production universally
known as ‘the studio system’.
Set reading
Dana Pollen, ‘The Limitless Potentials and the Potential Limits of Classical Hollywood
Cinema’, Film Analysis, pp.363-77.
Course Reader Item 4: Robert B. Ray, ‘The Culmination of Classic Hollywood: Casablanca’,
A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985), pp.89-112.
Further viewing
In order to test how typical or representative of classical Hollywood cinema Casablanca is,
you should watch a selection of studio films from the same period. I’d suggest starting with
other Warner Bros.-Humphrey Bogart vehicles such as The Maltese Falcon (dir. John
Huston, 1941), To Have and Have Not (dir. Howard Hawks, 1944) and The Big Sleep (dir.
Howard Hawks, 1946). Other films by Casablanca’s director Michael Curtiz, a ‘craftsman’
who worked in a range of genres, include The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City (1939) and White Christmas (1954).
The ‘cult’ appeal of Casablanca is explored in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam (1972).
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Further reading
Although Casablanca is widely regarded as a classic, there is surprisingly little critical
material - perhaps reflecting the perception of it as a studio rather than an auteur film. There
is, however, a comprehensive history of the film’s production:
Harmetz, Aljean, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca - Bogart,
Bergman and World War II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993)
The only major study of its director is:
Robertson, James C., The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz (London:
Routledge, 1993)
Otherwise your main sources will be studies of the Hollywood film industry, including:
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985)
Schatz, Thomas, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)
Schatz, Thomas, History of the American Cinema Volume 6. Boom and Bust:
American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
In the 1980s the University of Wisconsin Press published a series of studies based on the
Warner Bros. archives that each included a contextual history of the production and an
annotated screenplay. The series includes many of the studio’s classics including 42nd Street,
Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Mildred Pierce
and The Big Sleep - though oddly, for some reason, not Casablanca. However, a selection of
studio documents relating to the film’s production is reproduced in:
Behlmer, Rudy (ed.), Inside Warner Bros. 1935-1951 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1985)
Finally, Casablanca is subject to a semiotic analysis by:
Eco, Umberto, ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, Substance,
vol.14, no.2 (1985), pp.2-12. (A copy of this article, and others, is in the dossier on
Casablanca available for consultation in the HAF Slide Room.)
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5. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1954)
We conclude Part I of the course by looking at a genre that is synonymous with Hollywood:
the musical. While musicals are not unique to Hollywood, the genre is widely held to have
reached its most perfect form in the American cinema and to have a particular resonance with
American culture. Singin’ in the Rain was one of a cycle of extravagant Technicolor musicals
produced by the renowned Arthur Freed Unit at M-G-M in the post-war period that are
generally deemed to represent the artistic peak of the genre.
We will consider the formal and aesthethic strategies of Singin’ in the Rain as an example of
the ‘integrated musical’ that incorporates the spectacle of song and dance routines into the
narrative. With its foregrounding of spectacle and performance, the musical challenges the
conventional model of classical Hollywood cinema based on straightforward, unobtrusive,
invisible narration. The musical, in contrast, draws attention to its own fictionality and to its
status as entertainment. Is this a mechanism for disguising its ideological strategies, which
some critics have seen as highly conservative? Singin’ in the Rain is among the most highly
self-reflexive of musicals. It is set in Hollywood at the arrival of talking pictures in the late
1920s and can be seen as an example of Hollywood mythologising its own past.
Set reading
Jane Feuer, ‘Winking at the Audience’, in Film Analysis, pp.441-54.
Item 5 in the Course Reader: Jane Feuer, ‘Spectators and Spectacles’, The Hollywood
Musical (London: Macmillan/British Film Institute, 1982), pp.23-47.
Further viewing
There is no shortage of further viewing for the musical. Start with other films by the Arthur
Freed Unit, for example The Pirate (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1948), Easter Parade (dir.
Charles Walters, 1948), On the Town (dirs Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, 1949), An
American in Paris (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1951), The Band Wagon (dir. Vincente Minnelli,
1953) and Gigi (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1958). The other great cycle of Hollywood musicals again representing the ‘integrated musical’ - were the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers series
produced by Pandro S. Berman at RKO in the mid-1930s: for example The Gay Divorce (dir.
Mark Sandrich, 1934), Top Hat (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1935), Swing Time (dir. George Stevens,
1936) and Shall We Dance? (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1937). An alternative to the integrated
musical is the backstage musical, exemplified by the films produced by Busby Berkeley at
Warner Bros. such as 42nd Street (dir, Lloyd Bacon, 1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (dir.
Busby Berkeley, 1933) and Footlight Parade (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Dance, Girl, Dance
(dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1940) is a rare example of a studio film directed by a woman and has
been claimed by some critics as a feminist examination of the gendered ‘gaze’ in cinema.
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Further reading
The best starting point, once again, is the BFI ‘Film Classics’ series:
Wollen, Peter, Singin’ in the Rain (London: British Film Institute, 1992)
An illuminating analysis of Singin’ in the Rain and the ideology of entertainment can be
found in the section entitled ‘How to Take Gene Kelly Seriously’ in chapter 1 of:
Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
A useful introduction to the history of the musical is the relevant chapter in:
Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System
(New York: Random House, 1981)
While there are fewer studies of the Hollywood musical than, say, the Western (though there
is no shortage of celebratory ‘fan’ material), Singin’ in the Rain is invariably a key text in
studies such as:
Altman, Rick (ed.), Genre: The Musical (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)
Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical (Bllomington: Indiana University Press,
1987)
Barrios, Richard, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995)
Cohan, Steve (ed.), Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (London: Routledge,
2002)
Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical (London: Macmillan/British Film Institute,
1982)
For a history of the Freed Unit, see:
Fodin, Hugh, The World of Entertainment: The Movies’ Greatest Musicals (New
York: Avon, 1975)
While Fordin’s account is based largely on interviews with surviving personnel, the studio
archives inform chapters 19 and 22 of:
Schatz, Thomas, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)
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6. LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)
In Part II of the course we move on to examine five examples of European film-making. We
start with Jean Renoir, surely one of a handful of directors who, even following the denial of
the auteur theory, deserves the epithet of ‘great’. Renoir (second son of the Impressionist
painter Auguste Renoir) is particularly associated with a movement in French cinema of the
1930s that critics have labelled ‘Poetic Realism’. Poetic Realism was a style of film-making
characterised by narratives of disillusionment and despair, featuring fatalistic and doomed
protagonists who are victims of social conditions and circumstances beyond their control.
This is markedly different from the generally optimistic and affirmative films of classical
Hollywood. Hence Poetic Realism, like other national movements, is sometimes claimed as
an ‘alternative’ mode to classical Hollywood.
La Grande Illusion marked Renoir’s greatest critical and commercial success. It is a study of
national identity, masculinity, comradeship and, perhaps above all, class and social change.
Renoir’s films are characterised by a deceptively simple style of direction that privileges
composition in the frame through long takes and deep focus. ‘In his films,’ wrote Bazin, ‘the
search after composition in depth is, in effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent
panning shots and entrances.’ To this extent Renoir was ‘the precursor of Orson Welles’.
We will also consider the themes of the film, which was claimed by critics on the left as a
bold statement of pacifism (the ‘illusion’ of the title being the idea of national unity) and by
critics on the right as a defence of patriotism (the ‘illusion’ being the ideal of pacifism). How
can the same film support two such fundamentally contradictory readings?
Set reading
Course Reader Item 6: Pierre Sorlin, ‘Escaping the Present.’ The Film in History: Restaging
the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp.145-158.
Further viewing
La Grande Illusion is available in a DVD set with two other Renoir films, Le crime de
Monsieur Lang (1935) and La Bête Humaine (1938). You might also compare La Grande
Illusion to La règle du jeu (1939), a more bitter and satirical critique of French society that
provoked riots upon its release in Paris. Renoir’s later films (he worked in Hollywood during
the Second World War) are something of a mixed bag, though his propaganda film This Land
Is Mine (1943) displays his characteristic humanism. Look out, too, for other French films of
the 1930s such as L’Atalante (dir. Jean Vigo, 1934), Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier,
1937) and Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938), which reveal the extent to which Poetic
Realism was a group style rather than unique to Renoir.
15
Further reading
After some time in the critical wilderness, there are signs of a revival of interest in Renoir
and La Grande Illusion in particular, demonstrated by two recent studies:
Jackson, Julian, La Grande Illusion (London: British Film Institute, 2009)
O’Shaughnessy, Martin, La Grande Illusion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009)
There is a reasonable critical literature on Renoir in English, though it is not as extensive as
the likes of Hitchcock or Ford. The most useful studies are:
Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986)
O’Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000)
Insights into Renoir’s view of film (and much else besides) can be gleaned from:
LoBianco, Lorraine, and David Thompson (eds), Jean Renoir: Letters (London: Faber
and Faber, 1994)
Renoir, Jean, My Life, My Films (New York: Atheneum, 1974)
The nearest equivalent of Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema
for the French film industry is:
Crisp, Colin, The Classic French Cinema 1930-1960 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993)
Renoir’s films inevitably feature prominently in critical studies of French cinema such as:
Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)
Hayward, Susan, and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts
(London: Routledge, 1990)
Powrie, Phil (ed.), The Cinema of France (London: Wallflower Press, 2002)
And a useful introductory text on ‘European cinema’ (including a case study of La règle du
jeu) is:
Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (eds), European Cinema: An Introduction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000)
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7. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945)
Brief Encounter exemplifies what film critics and historians have identified as a tradition of
‘quality’ in British cinema during the mid-1940s. The terms of this debate centred around
notions of realism on the one hand (influenced especially by the documentary movement) and
literary pedigree on the other. Critics averred that the Second World War had brought a new
degree of realism (both aesthetic and psychological) to British film-making in contrast to the
flimsy entertainment cinema of the 1930s. The critic Roger Manvell, for example, wrote in
1946: ‘This new vitality, this new individuality are of essential importance to British cinema,
and they are a direct product of the War years.’
Brief Encounter was one of four films arising from the fruitful creative collaboration of
director David Lean and writer Noël Coward. It was much admired at the time for its sober
narrative that eschewed melodrama in preference for emotional restraint and psychological
realism. Those same features later brought about a critical reaction against the film, often
caricatured for its ‘stiff upper lip’ characterisations, at a time when film studies was more
interested in films of melodramatic excess. More recently Brief Encounter has come back
into favour as a film that is open to reading from a gay perspective: its bittersweet story of an
unconsummated love affair has special resonances for gay male critics.
We will consider various different readings of Brief Encounter, focusing especially on its
representation of a sense of ‘Englishness’ that is outside history and geography. In particular
we will look for clues to establishing the time and place of Brief Encounter. We will also
consider whether its emotional restraint is a conscious aesthetic choice or a result of cultural
determinants.
Set reading
Course Reader Item 7: Antonia Lant, ‘Processing History: The Timing of Brief Encounter’.
Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), pp.153-196.
Further viewing
David Lean is best known as the director of epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) that seem far removed from
the intimacy of Brief Encounter, though his unjustly under-rated Ryan’s Daughter (1970) is a
sort of ‘intimate epic’ that stands up remarkably well today despite its hostile reception from
critics at the time. Lean also directed two celebrated adaptations of Charles Dickens, Great
Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). Lean and Coward’s other three collaborations
were the wartime propaganda films In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944)
and, in an entirely different vein, the supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945).
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Further reading
Brief Encounter is a canonical text for British cinema and there is no shortage of reading
matter. I would suggest starting with the BFI ‘Film Classic’:
Dyer, Richard, Brief Encounter (London: British Film Institute, 1993)
Dyer reads the film in terms of its ‘Englishness’ but also suggests a gay reading; for a more
trenchant reading from that perspective see:
Medhurst, Andy, ‘That special thrill: Brief Encounter, homosexuality and authorship’,
Screen, vol.32, no.2 (Summer 1991), pp.
The discourses of ‘quality’ cinema are analysed in:
Ellis, John, ‘Art, Culture, Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’,
Screen, vol.19, no.3 (Autumn 1978), pp.9-49. (A revised and more accessible version
of this article, shorn of its comparisons with the 1970s, was published as ‘The Quality
Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942-1948’, in Andrew Higson, ed.,
Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 1996, pp.66-93.)
More general studies of British cinema including some discussion of Brief Encounter are:
Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British
Film Institute, 1996). (See especially the introduction, ‘Amnesia and Schizophrenia’.)
Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London:
Cassell, 2000)
Landy, Marcia, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991)
Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-49
(London: Routledge, 1989)
Murphy, Robert (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute,
1997)
There is a dearth of good critical studies of David Lean, but an authoritative biography is:
Brownlow, Kevin, David Lean (London: Richard Cohen, 1996)
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8. THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)
This week we move away from nationally-specific movements to look at the international
phenomenon known as ‘art cinema’. Most historians see this as a feature of (predominantly
Western) European cinemas in the decades following the Second World War. It is a
movement focused on auteurs (such as Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais,
Michelangelo Antonioni) and characterised by more ambiguous and open narratives. The art
cinema movement also encompassed some non-Western film-makers (such as Satyajit Ray
and Akira Kurosawa) whose films were shown to great acclaim in the West. David Bordwell
argues that art cinema is a distinct mode of film practice with its own formal practices and
conventions, particularly psychological realism and authorial expressivity.
Ingmar Bergman is closely associated with the art cinema movement and The Seventh Seal
(Der Sjunde Inseglet) is the film that established his international reputation amongst critics.
It is an allegorical film dealing with existential and other philosophical issues through a story
of a medieval knight who plays chess with the figure of Death. Its obscure narrative and
philosophical discourses have made The Seventh Seal an endlessly debated film as critics
attempt to unravel what it is ‘about’. Like Citizen Kane’s ‘Rosebud’, the quest to discover the
‘meaning’ of The Seventh Seal is a recurring concern within film criticism. Yet there is much
more to The Seventh Seal: it is also a film of great, if austere, visual power and expression.
We will, therefore, also consider how Bergman uses form to create meaning, considering the
film’s relationship to other film styles such as the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s and the
work of other Scandinavian directors such as Victor Sjöstrom and Carl Theodor-Dreyer.
Set reading
Marilyn Johns Blackwell, ‘Cinematic Form and Cultural Criticism’, Film Analysis, pp.529548.
David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.’ Film Criticism, vol.4, no.1
(1979), pp.56-64.
Further viewing
Bergman’s key period was between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s with a series of intense,
brooding dramas including Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957), The
Virgin Spring (1960), Silence (1963) and Persona (1966). Easily characterised (caricatured
even) as all Nordic gloom and depression, Bergman’s late-career masterpiece Fanny and
Alexander (1983) is surprisingly accessible and affirmative. The influence of The Seventh
Seal can be seen in such varied films as Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1976) and Bill &
Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991).
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Further reading
Again the best starting point is the BFI’s ‘Film Classics’ series:
Bragg, Melvyn, The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) (London: British Film Institute,
1993)
A trawl through back issues of critical magazines such as Sight and Sound will unearth a
wealth of responses to Bergman, a key figure in the art cinema movement, though in recent
times the director has been less fashionable. Useful studies include:
Blackwell, Marilyn, Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar
Bergman (Columbia: Camden, 1997)
Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1986)
Kahn, Jesse, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003)
Bergman’s own views on film-making can be discerned from:
Bergman, Ingmar, Images: My Life in Film (New York: Little, 1994)
Björkman, Stig, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima (eds), Bergman on Bergman (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1973)
There is little in English on Swedish cinema, though recent work has tended to place it in the
context of ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Nordic’ cinema:
Soila, Tytti, The Cinema of Scandinavia (London: Wallflower Press, 2003)
Solia, Tytti, Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Gunnar Iversen, Nordic National
Cinemas (London: Routledge, 1998)
For a different approach to the notion of art cinema, see
Neale, Steve, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, vol.22, no.1 (1981), pp.11-39.
Both the Bordwell and Neale essays are included in a useful collection of critical writings on
aspects of European cinema:
Fowler, Catherine (ed.), The European Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2002)
And a recent study of the reception of European art cinema in the United States:
Betz, Mark, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009)
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9. A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (1960)
The ‘nouvelle vague’ (‘new wave’) was a phrase used to describe a group of new, mostly
young French directors who made their first films in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s
including Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,
Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. While their films were very different in
content and style - the new wave should never be seen as a unified or coherent ‘school’ what they all shared was a commitment to the idea of film as a form of personal expression.
Some, including Godard and Truffaut, had also been film critics before they turned their hand
to direction and were steeped in cinema history - particularly Hollywood.
A bout de souffle (known in English as Breathless) is the paradigmatic example of new wave
cinema. ‘What I wanted,’ Godard said, ‘was to take a conventional story and remake, but
differently, everything the cinema had done.’ On one level A bout de souffle is a gangster
film and an homage to the Hollywood B-movie (Godard dedicated the film to Monogram
Pictures, one of Hollywood’s minor studios.) On another level it is a deconstruction of
classical film form, employing all manner of jarring discontinuity devices, especially jump
cuts and non-match on action shots. The result of Godard’s breaking of the ‘rules’ of classical
narration is a highly kinetic style of cinema that seems quite literally ‘out of breath’.
Set reading
Richard Neupert, ‘Godard Jumps Ahead’, in Film Analysis, pp.567-81.
Item 9 in the Course Reader: Michel Marie, ‘“It really makes you sick!”: Jean-Luc Godard’s
A bout de souffle (1959), in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film:
Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.201-215.
Further viewing
Although it was short-lived - most commentators agreed that it had exhausted itself by c.1963
- the French new wave was responsible for several important films. The earliest, and most
conventional, were And God Created Woman (dir. Roger Vadim, 1956) and The Lovers (dir.
Louis Malle, 1958), the films that made stars of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau
respectively, but the films that came most to represent the new wave were those of Claude
Chabrol - Beau Serge (1959) and The Cousins (1960) - and François Truffaut: The 400 Blows
(1959), Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962). Godard became the darling of the
cineastes, deconstructing genres such as the romantic comedy (Une femme est une femme),
the gangster film (Bande à Part) and science fiction (Alphaville). His Le Mépris (1963) is
generally seen as marking the symbolic end of the new wave, whereafter he moved towards
‘counter-cinema’ in Pierrot le fou (1965) and Weekend (1967).
21
Further reading
You should have no difficulty in finding critical material on A bout de souffle, both in its own
right and in the context of French new wave cinema. The two most recent studies are:
Marie, Michel, The French New Wave: An Artistic School (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
Neupert, Richard, A History of the French New Wave (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2003)
Other works either wholly or partly about the new wave include:
Forbes, Jill, The Cinema in France After the New Wave (London: Macmillan, 1992)
Graham, Peter (ed.), The New Wave (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968)
Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
Wilson, Emma, French Cinema Since 1950: Personal Histories (London: Gerald
Duckworth, 1999)
The critical literature on Godard in English is limited and tends to reflect the high theoretical
agenda of film studies at the time that Godard was the enfant terrible of film culture:
MacCabe, Colin, Laura Mulvey and Michael Eaton, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics
(London: British Film Institute, 1980)
More accessible studies are limited in the main to:
Sterritt, David, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999)
And two older studies:
Brown, Richard (ed.), Focus on Godard (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1072)
Roud, Richard, Jean-Luc Godard (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970)
A selection of interviews and critical essays by Godard can be found in:
Milne, Tom (ed.), Godard on Godard (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972)
And for a general, if highly theorised, history of French cinema, see:
Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)
22
10. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
Belle de Jour is another example of the international art cinema movement, exemplifying its
stylistic diversity in so far as its glossy visual style and high-contrast colour cinemtaography
are very different from the expressionist black-and-white gloom of The Seventh Seal. At the
same time, however, Belle de Jour again demonstrates the obscurity of art cinema. Its
narrative of a frigid Parisienne housewife who enjoys a secret other life in a suburban brothel
blurs the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ to such a degree that is difficult to know
how much of the film takes place only in the imagination of its protagonist. This is a
characteristic device of art cinema, questioning our assumptions about the diegetic world of
the film and our ‘knowledge’ of what happens.
Luis Buñuel, like Hitchcock and Ford, enjoyed a long career, having started making films in
the 1920s, notably the acclaimed Surrealist classic Un chien andalou (1929), and spending
many years working in Mexican cinema. Belle de Jour, a critical and commercial success, is
from Buñuel’s late career when he had returned to film-making in Europe.
Belle de Jour provides a particularly apposite conclusion to this module because it is
comparable in several ways to our first film, Rear Window. For one thing both films are
much concerned with the act of looking, reminding us that voyeurism and spectatorship are at
the heart of ‘reading’ a film. Like Hitchcock’s film, furthermore, Belle de Jour is particularly
open to interpretation from the perspective of psychoanalytical feminism, not least because of
its examination of female desire and sexuality. And the presence of the ethereal beauty
Catherine Deneuve, another ‘cool blonde’ in the style of Grace Kelly, offers us another way
of reading film through stars and performance.
Set reading
Peter William Evans, ‘Female Desire.’ The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.134-172. (This chapter also includes a close reading of
Buñuel’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, which is used as a comparison with Belle de Jour.
You may, if you wish, choose to focus solely on the section on Belle de Jour, pp.151-172.)
Further viewing
Buñuel enjoyed an immensely rich and creative period between the late 1960s and mid-1970s
including Tristana (1970) - again with Catherine Deneuve - The Discrete Charm of the
Bourgeoisie (1973), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire
(1977) - all films that question the notion of diegetic reality and are notable for Buñuel’s
characteristic mixture of seriousness and satire.
23
Further reading
Again I would suggest starting with the entry on Belle de Jour in the BFI ‘Film Classics’
series:
Wood, Michael, Belle de Jour (London: British Film Institute, 2000)
While there is a range of critical writing on Buñuel in Spanish, the literature in English
mainly comprises:
Edwards, Gwynne, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel (London: Boyars, 1982)
Evans, Peter William, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
Mellen, Joan (ed.), The World of Luis Buñuel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978)
Sandro, Paul, Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987)
And a solid biography:
Baxter, John, Buñuel (London: Fourth Estate, 1994)
Buñuel’s autobiography:
Buñuel, Luis, My Last Breath, trans Abigail Israel (London: Jonathan Cape,
1984)
It would also be worthwhile dipping into material on Surrealist and other avant-garde film
practices:
Williams, Linda, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
And, as ever, don’t forget the HAF dossier on Belle de Jour which, like those on other films,
contains a variety of reviews and critical articles from film journals that are not readily
available elsewhere.
24
FURTHER READING - GENERAL
In addition to your weekly reading around the set films, you should also read as widely as
possible in film theory and film history. An important part of studying film, as with any
subject, is to have an understanding of the range of different approaches and how they may
illuminate our understanding of the subject. Fortunately there is a wide range of good
introductory texts for film studies. The following list is intended as a guide only. On the one
hand you do not need to read every word of each of these books (several of them duplicate
ideas and approaches). On the other hand you should range beyond this list to follow up your
own particular interests and to help in preparation for your assignments.
Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1985). To date still the only historiographical and methodological study of the
practice of film history: a highly didactic outline of four approaches to film history (aesthetic,
technological, economic, social) with examples and case studies reflecting the authors’ own
research interests in early American cinema.
Andrew, Dudley, The Major Film Theories (London: Oxford University Press, 1976). One of
the first attempts to synthesise theoretical approaches to film: now somewhat dated but still
containing some insights.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGrawHill, 1979 & subsequent editions). This is the standard and most widely used introduction to
the formal analysis of film with easy-to-use, heavily illustrated chapters on shot composition,
editing, mise-en-scène etc. The current edition, the ninth (2010), includes a DVD Rom.
Highly recommended for all students: over time it repays the investment manifold.
Collins, Jim, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies
(London: Routledge, 1993). An attempt to make film theory accessible through essays on
contemporary film subjects, this student-oriented collection now seems rather dated by its
emphasis on voguish early 1990s films such as Thelma & Louise and The Silence of the
Lambs. The best essay is Thomas Schatz’s historical piece on ‘The New Hollywood’.
Cook, Pam (ed.), The Cinema Book, 3rd edn (London: British Film Institute, 2007). A classic
introduction to and summary of the discipline of film studies: very useful, highly didactic.
The third edition includes more on film history, though the better sections are those carried
over from the first edition (1985) on genre, authorship and theoretical frameworks.
Hayward, Susan, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 2000). A very useful
glossary of ‘concepts’ including critical approaches (such as authorship) and film movements
(such as Neo-Realism).
Hill, John, and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998). Similar to The Cinema Book, though more idiosyncratic in
content: also available in three separate parts as Film Studies: Critical Approaches, American
Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches and World Cinema: Critical Approaches.
25
Hollows, Joanne, and Mark Jancovich (eds), Approaches to popular film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995). A straightforward, accessible introduction to the main
approaches to film studies: authorship, genre, historical poetics, psychoanalysis, etc.
Hollows, Joanne, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Film Studies Reader
(London: Arnold, 2000). A useful anthology of key readings.
Lapsley, Robert, and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006). Covers similar ground to Hollows & Jancovich, though
in a denser fashion: best read as a follow-up to one of the other books.
Katz, Ephraim, The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan, 1996).
The most reliable of the single-authored ‘encyclopedias’ or ‘dictionaries’ with good short
essays and full filmographies for most major directors.
Monaco, James, How to Read A Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia, 3rd edn (New York:
Oxford University Press). A good introduction to textual analysis but also includes a useful
overview of film theories: the only text to engage critically with ‘multimedia’.
Nichols, Bill (ed.), Movies and Methods 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975). A collection of articles and book extracts that broadly reflects the agenda of film
studies at the time of publication.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995). Probably the best survey of the history of ‘world cinema’, especially
good on the industrial and cultural contexts of different national cinemas. Recommended.
Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Laurence King,
2005). An attempt to rival Bordwell & Thompson’s Film Art that covers much the same sort
of ground: a perfectly competent alternative, though very much the Andrew V. McLaglen to
the other’s John Ford. Fewer colour plates – hence cheaper!
Roberts, Graham, and Heather Wallis, Key Film Texts (London: Arnold, 2002): A basic text,
includes many of the same films as Film Analysis though in much less depth.
Roberts, Graham, and Heather Wallis, Introducing Film (London: Arnold, 2004): A
companion volume to the above looking at approaches to film studies; ditto.
Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1994). A comprehensive, if somewhat dull, survey of the main national film
industries and stylistic movements, particularly strong on formal analysis as one might expect
from the authors of Film Art. Slightly less useful than The Oxford History.
26
FILM STUDIES RESOURCES
University Library
The David Wilson Library has a good, and ever-expanding, range of resources that support
Film Studies. Most obviously these include books and specialist journals such as Screen,
Cinema Journal and Cineaste. A wider range of journals is available electronically through
the Leicester e-link including the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
The Film Studies Subject Room (a virtual rather than an actual room!) contains a number of
useful resources. These include Film Index International, which lists articles on film (and
television) published in around 150 different journals. Remember that if a particular journal
is not available in the University Library, or through the Leicester e-link, you can request an
inter-library loan. There are also links to organisations such as the British Film Institute,
whose SIFT database is another useful way of searching for articles on specific films.
To get to the subject room go the Library homepage and then follow through these pages:
Welcome to the Library – Leicester Digital Library – Subject Rooms – Arts and Humanities
– Film Studies.
Bear in mind that the Library usually holds only one or two copies of most books. If titles are
particularly in demand they are placed in Short Loan, which allows them to be borrowed for a
few hours or overnight. If a particular book is not available, you can place a hold on it. You
should always plan your reading in advance, especially when preparing your essays.
HAF Film Studies dossiers
In the HAF Slide Room are dossiers of further reading material on each of the set films: these
are mostly reviews and articles from journals that are not necessarily available in the
University Library. It’s worthwhile checking the dossiers before putting in an inter-library
loan request. The dossiers are for student use - please do not take them from the Slide Room.
The Internet
The huge expansion of the World Wide Web since the mid-1990s means that a great deal of
material is now available online. The Internet is an enormously useful tool for research,
particularly when you can access academic books and journals online. It is rather less useful
as a source. This is because the vast majority of the material available online is non-refereed:
i.e. it has not gone through the rigorous process of peer review applied for scholarly
monographs (e.g. those published by university presses) and learned journals. One of the
skills of modern study is learning how to differentiate good material from the dross.
27
Bear in mind that search engines such as Google are commercial operations and that some
websites pay to be on the first page of ‘hits’. You can bet your bottom dollar that these will
not include any academic sites, so don’t jump too enthusiastically onto the first hit that turns
up. In general you should avoid websites such as Wikipedia. This is described as ‘the online
encyclopedia that anyone can edit’. Translation: ‘Any idiot can write and edit an entry.’ In
particular many of the entries on films seem to have been written by film students whose
work would warrant less than a 2:2. So you should not rely on this sort of material: in fact
you are best advised to avoid it completely.
If you do use any web material, you should cite it as you would a print source, including the
title of the website, the URL and the date you accessed it. You must identify the provenance
of any material you use. As a rule of thumb: if you can’t identify the source, particularly the
author, it’s not worth using. If it does not provide references for sources or quotations - ditto.
In short, avoid anything that does not conform to accepted scholarly conventions. Better still
– read books and print journals rather than websites.
That said there are some useful websites for film studies. BFI Screenonline is a good resource
for film and television (www.screenonline.org.uk). You can search for information on films,
organisations and individuals. Usually there is a synopsis and full credits, a short critical
essay (by a recognised scholar) and examples of contemporary reviews. The entry for Brief
Encounter, for example, includes the contemporary review of the film in the Monthly Film
Bulletin (www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/456083/).
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is a useful site for cast, credits and links,
though the reviews here are by ordinary cinema-goers rather than film critics. For films
produced since the mid-1990s the information is fairly reliable, though it’s always
worthwhile double-checking against a print source. For pre-1990s films IMDb is less reliable.
Box Office Mojo (www.boxofficemojo.com) contains accurate statistical information on boxoffice grosses of films since the 1990s. Again, the further back you go, the less reliable this
sort of information tends to become.
There are a couple of peer-reviewed online-only journals for film studies. Scope: An Online
Journal of Film Studies (www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk) is published by the Institute of Film
Studies at the University of Nottingham. Screening the Past: An international electronic
journal of visual media and history (www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast) is hosted by
Latrobe University, Australia. Both include book reviews as well as scholarly articles. Senses
of Cinema (www.sensesofcinema.com) is a more eclectic, non-refereed online journal.
A final note of caution. Plagiarism is still plagiarism, whether the material plagiarised is a
scholarly article or a pile of dog’s mess from the web. ‘He who filters your good name steals
trash’. Under no circumstances should you compile your essays by ‘cutting and pasting’ from
websites. Other than throwing paint over the Vice-Chancellor’s new Jaguar, this is the fastest
route you can take towards disciplinary action and the termination of your degree.
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ESSAY 1
Write an essay of c.2000 words in response to one of the following questions:
1. What is distinctively ‘Hitchcockian’ about Rear Window?
2. Analyse the formal and narrative structure of The Searchers.
3. ‘To write about Citizen Kane is to write about the cinema’ (Peter Wollen). Discuss.
4. How far does Casablanca represent ‘the culmination of Classic Hollywood’s thematic and
formal strategies’ (Robert B. Ray)?
5. Does Singin’ in the Rain deconstruct or mythologise the notion of ‘entertainment’?
You are advised to read the Notes on writing essays for film studies before commencing your
work. These notes are available on Blackboard.
Your essay should be properly referenced with either footnotes/endnotes or in-text references
(the ‘Harvard’ system). You should include a bibliography of all the sources you have used in
preparing your essay. The bibliography is not included in the word count but references and
notes are (this is to discourage the practice of writing secondary essays in the footnotes).
This essay is worth 50% of your total assessment for the course.
The deadline for submission of this assignment is 12.00 on Friday 7 November 2014.
29
ESSAY 2
Write an essay of c.2000 words in response to one of the following questions:
6. How does La Grande Illusion exemplify the style and ethos of Poetic Realism?
7. Is Brief Encounter best understood as a sober realist drama or as an imaginary love affair?
8. To what extent does The Seventh Seal demonstrate the characteristics of ‘art cinema’?
9. How, and to what effect, does Godard ‘break the rules’ of film-making in A bout de
soufflé?
10. Discuss the relationship between fantasy and reality in Belle de Jour.
You are advised to read the Notes on writing essays for film studies before commencing your
work. These notes are available both on Blackboard and in hard copy in the Slide Room.
Your essay should be properly referenced with either footnotes/endnotes or in-text references
(the ‘Harvard’ system). You should include a bibliography of all the sources you have used in
preparing your essay. The bibliography is not included in the word count but references and
notes are (this is to discourage the practice of writing secondary essays in the footnotes).
This essay is worth 50% of your total assessment for the course.
The deadline for submission of this assignment is 12.00 on Friday 12 December 2014.
30
SUBMISSION OF ASSIGNMENTS
In common with other modules in the Department of History of Art and Film, your essays are
to be submitted in two forms.
A hard copy should be posted in the essay box on the 17th Floor landing by the deadline.
Before putting your essay in the box, you should complete a cover sheet (the blue forms
which are available in the Slide Room) and attach it to the front of your essay.
An electronic copy should be submitted by the deadline through Blackboard. This serves as
an archived copy in the event of any later queries over your work. The electronic copy is also
run through anti-plagiarism detection software.
Your work will not be marked unless both hard and electronic copies are submitted on time.
The procedure for submitting your essay through Blackboard is as follows:
1. Log on to Blackboard.
2. Select the module title: Reading Film.
3. Click on Assignments on the left hand side.
4. Click on the relevant coursework title (‘Essay 1’ or ‘Essay 2’)
5. You will automatically be directed to the turnitin.co.uk page. Click on the Submit
icon.
6. Fill in the required information (first name, last name, title of your assignment).
7. Click on the Browse button to find the piece of work on your computer. Click on the
file and press the Open button.
8. Click on the Submit button.
9. You will be shown the contents of the file you have selected. If it is the correct file,
answer the question Is this the paper you want to submit by pressing the Yes button.
10. You will be directed to a new screen confirming the successful submission of your
work with a digital receipt. You will also receive an email receipt confirming your
submission, and the date and time at which it was submitted. You should save this
email as your proof of submitting your work.
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32
Detailed, subtle and
probing analysis
Independent approach to
making argument and
selecting evidence
Critical Analysis
and Evaluation of
Texts
Independent
Thinking
Accurate and clearly
intelligible
Clear, fluent and
pleasing to read
Near faultless use of
conventions and proofreading
Readability
Presentation
Some unsystematic
errors and proof-reading
oversights
Substantial relevant
evidence
Thoughtful, coherent
and well-organised
Demonstrates some
independence in choice
of evidence or shape of
argument
Detailed and thorough
analysis
Substantiation/Use Argument wellof Evidence
supported with a range
of primary and
secondary sources
Thoughtful, conceptually
rich, well-structured and
exploratory
Evidence of wide and
detailed reading in the
literature, its contexts
and in film studies/art
history as appropriate
Knowledge
Argument
Directly relevant to the
question
Directly relevant to the
subtleties of the question
Relevance to the
question
Evidence of resourceful
reading (beyond core
texts, and lecture and
seminar topics)
Upper Second
First
Some systematic errors
in presentation and
evidence of inattentive
proof-reading
Some minor losses of
clarity and accuracy
Substantial evidence
Coherent and organised
argument, with some
evidence of thinking
about the question
Some evidence of
independent thinking
Analysis offered in
support of the argument
Good knowledge of the
core texts, and issues
covered in lectures and
seminars, and evidence
of background reading
Substantially relevant to
the question
Lower Second
History of Art and Film Marking Criteria
Descriptive or
narrative
presentation
Limited or
superficial analysis
with a tendency to
description
Flaws in
expression,
problems with
intelligibility
Flaws contribute to
lack of
intelligibility in
some passages
Careless proofreading and poor
knowledge of
conventions for
referencing
Gaps in the
illustration of the
argument
Some relevant
illustration and
evidence
Systematic errors,
insufficiently
careful proofing
and referencing
Little or no logical
argument or though
Limited or
underdeveloped
argument and
thinking about the
problem
Deficient in
thoughtfulness,
clarity and
coherence
The conventions of
referencing have
not been learned;
the work has not
been proof-read
Widespread lack of
intelligibility,
inarticulate
Little evidence
Little evidence of
independent
thought, highly
derivative
Limited
independent
thought,
derivative
Little evidence of
independent
thinking, even
derivative
Little analysis
Little subject
knowledge
Substantial gaps
in subject
knowledge
Gaps in subject
knowledge
Fail
Little relevance
Pass
Substantial
irrelevance or
generalization
Some irrelevance or
generalization
Third