Film Studies
Film Studies
for Yale
Graduate Students
Silent Shorts
Before the Nickelodeon
The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903)
A Trip to the Moon (Mlis, 1902)
The Lonely Villa (Griffith, 1909)
Silent Features
The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)
Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)
Within Our Gates (Micheaux, 1920)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920)
Sherlock Junior (Keaton, 1924)
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1921)
Metropolis (Lang, 1925)
Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
Sound Features
U.S.A.
The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927)
Blonde Venus (von Sternberg, 1932)
It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
Singin in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1969)
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1969)
Sweet, Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles, 1971)
Badlands (Malick, 1973)
The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
Europe
M (Lang, 1930)
A Nous la libert (Clair, 1931)
LAtalante (Vigo, 1934)
Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)
Pais (Rossellini, 1946)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1947)
La dolce vita (Fellini, 1959)
Hiroshima Mon Amor (Resnais, 1959)
Pickpocket (Bresson, 1960)
Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962)
Playtime (Tati, 1966)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
Loves of a Blonde (Forman, 1966)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)
The Red and the White (Jansco, 1967)
Aguirre the Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
Ali Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)
World Cinema
Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936)
Mara Candelaria (Fernndez, Mxico, 1943)
Los Olivados (Buuel, Mxico, 1950)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
Panther Panchli (Ray, 1955)
Cruel Story of Youth (Oshima, 1960)
Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1964)
Black Girl (Sembene, 1966)
Double Suicide (Shinoda, 1969)
Sholay (Sippi, 1973)
Touki Bouki (Mambety, 1972)
Documentary
Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
Land without Bread (Bunuel, 1932)
Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956)
Primary (Leacock, 1960)
Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1961)
The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophuls, 1969)
Experimental
Entracte (Clair/Picabia, 1924)
Ballet Mecanique (Dudley Murphy, Fernand Lger, 1924)
Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali, 1928)
Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1944)
Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953)
Dog Star Man (Prelude), Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1961)
New Voices 19771990
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978)
Illusions (Dash, 1982)
A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiou-Hsien, Taiwan, 1985)
When Father Was Away on Business (Kusturica, Yugoslavia, 1985)
Yeelen (Ciss, Mali, 1987)
Where is the Friends House (Kiarostami, Iran, 1988)
Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou, PRC, 1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, USA, 1989)
Essential Texts of Film
Studies: The Yale
Graduate List
1. Early Film Theories
Ricciotto Canudo, The Birth of a Sixth art, in Richard Abel, French
Film Theory
Georg Lukcs, Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema, (1913), in
McCormick, Guenther-Pal, pp. 11-16
Bla Balzs, Sketches for a Theory of Film, from Visible Man, Or
the Culture of Film, (Berghahn Books, 2010), 17-84.
Jean Epstein, Le cinematographe vu de lEtna in Jean Epstein
Critical Essays 287-310.
Dziga Vertov, We: variant of a manifesto (1922) and Kinoks: a
Revolution (1923) in Kino.Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov,
University of California Press, 1984
Sergei Eisenstein, A Dialectical approach to Film Form; Word
and Image
2. Art and Media in the 1930s
Rudolph Arnheim, chapters 1-3, in Film as Art
Erwin Panofsky, Style and medium in the Motion Pictures, [1934]
in Angela Dalle Vacche, The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and
Art History, 69-84.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
3. Postwar Film Theory
Andre Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, Myth of Total
Cinema, Montage Prohibited, In defense of Impure Cinema,
The Italian School of Neorealism
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Chapters 1-4, and 14.
Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, pp 1-75
4. Semiotics, Ideology
Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, ch. 1
Christian Metz, Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cinema of Poetry
Roland Barthes, The Third Meaning in Image Music Text
Stephen Heath, Narrative Space in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
5. Apparatus, Psychoanalysis
Christian Metz, Identification, Mirror from Imaginary Signifier
J-L Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus, in Philip Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology,
Columbia Univ. Press, pp. 286-298.
Daniel Dayan, The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema
Michel Chion, Projections of Sound on Image in Audio-Vision
6. Media and Social Formation
Jane Gaines, White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and
Gender in Feminist Film Theory, from Screen, v 29 1988)
Richard Dyer, White, from Screen, v 29 1988)
Fredric Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture in
Signatures of the Visible
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message and Media Hot
and Cold, in Understanding Media
Raymond Williams, The Technology and the Society, in
Television: Technology and Cultural Form
7. Cultural History, Modernity
Jacques Aumont, The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the
Gaze, in Image in Dispute, 231-258
Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions
Miriam Hansen, The Mass production of the senses: Classical
Cinema ad Vernacular Modernism, in L. Williams, ed. Reinventing
Film Studies
Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp.
1-84, 155-261, 298-308, 365-385.
Thomas Schatz, from The Genius of the System, Parts I and II.
8. Philosophy, Aesthetics
Stanley Cavell, from More of The World Viewed sections 1-4, and
conclusion.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement Image, ch 1-4; Cinema
2: the Time Image, chs 1, 4.
9. Genres/Documentary
Rick Altman, A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre [in
Film/Genre]
Philip Rosen, Document and Documentary: on the Persistence of
Historical Concepts in Rosen, Change Mummified
Brian Winston, The Documentary film as Scientific Inscription in
Renov, Theoriziing Documentary
10. Alternative Cinemas
Stan Brakhage, From Metaphors on Vision in Sitney, The Avant-
Garde Film, 120-128.
P. Adams Sitney, Major Mythopoeia in Visionary Cinema
Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film
Solanas and Getino, Towards a Third Cinema [n Robert Stam,
ed., Film Theory