U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES SPRING 2009

Histart 24

FRESHMAN SEMINAR: CLASSIC MOVIES AS VISIAL ART (4 units)
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9-12
104 Moffitt, CCN: 05463
David Wright

This seminar will meet only during the first twelve weeks of the semester. Attendance at the first class is essential. This seminar will devote twelve Thursday mornings to looking thoughtfully at Classic Movies, treating them as visual art, analyzing particularly the camera work and editing, also the staging and lighting, always seeking to understand how these aspects contribute to the total expressive effect of the movie. Each week one movie will be analyzed closely and students will write a brief report on a specific aspect of it. Usually extracts of another movie or shorts will also be shown, to expand students' knowledge of the medium. The movies analyzed will range from The Last Man (Germany 1924) to Bicycle Thieves (Italy 1949), all of them general release movies widely seen in their time. The only Hollywood movie analyzed will be Citizen Kane (by Orson Welles, 1941). The movies will be projected on a large screen, normally from DVD, allowing us easily to go back to specific episodes for detailed analysis and discussion. No reading; no other written work.

[FOOD FOR THOUGHT PROGRAM]
David H. Wright has been a devoted still photographer since childhood and continues to make all the slides for his lectures (which are mostly on Rome and the Dark Ages). He completed the undergraduate requirements in Physics at Harvard soon after the War, but switched to Fine Arts, provoked by his photography. He spends about three months a year traveling in Europe for his research, incidentally visiting many of the venues of the movies studied in this course, and deepening his knowledge of the social history reflected in them.