FILM STUDIES / FILM AND IDEOLOGY – Ilinca Anghelescu
American Studies Minors (IB)
Course description and syllabus
 

The course examines codes and conventions of American cinema, with a view to identifying those elements that make it an important ideological medium.
With this purpose, the lectures span a variety of topics, from the beginnings of film in general, and in the United States in particular, to elements of style essential to film analysis and comprehension, to the intrinsic relationship between film and ideology, to genre and theories of spectatorship and fandom.
Requirements. The student is required to attend the lectures and to have a minimum of 70% attendance in seminars. Students will also be expected to attend extra-curricular screenings of important films.
Assignments. Students are expected to submit two written assignments by the end of the semester, drawing on the films screened and discussed in class and employing tools of analysis and discourse as taught in class and as read in the course pack. At the end of the semester, students will sit in a one-hour written examination.

Week 1: What is a movie; Brief history of the moving picture; Film and ideology
Weeks 2, 3: Style: Editing, montage, mise-en-scene, design, directing
**Citizen Kane; a Hitchcock movie
Weeks 4-8: American topics:
- identity (ethnic topoi) ** Do the Right Thing
- freedom/liberation ** Thelma and Louise
- violence ** Natural Born Killers
- postmodern domestic identities ** Sex, Lies and Videotapes / American Beauty
Week 9: Fantasy / film noir / science fiction ** Blade Runner / Matrix / Mulholland Drive
Week 10: Realism and documentary style: ** Blow Up / The Blair Witch Project
Week 11: Writing about film
Week 12: Spectatorship / Stars & fandom