Watching a filmed story is a complex act involving sensations, emotions, and ideas. From its birth, film absorbed photography, painting, theater, drama, fiction, poetry, sculpture, architecture, dance, and music. Add to these a moving camera, instantaneous shifts in space and time, and complex interactions of words, sounds, and images, and film becomes a unique art form.
In four sessions, Jack Jorgens, professor emertius in the department of literature at American University, looks at scenes from some of the best screen works, asking what constitutes style in film and how cinematic expression works. He explores how the images and sounds that wash over viewers are chosen, written, designed, shaped, and performed.
Please Note: All individual sessions are also available for separate purchase.
Sept. 7 The Transforming Art
Film’s ability to illuminate powerful stories and complex lives is reflected and analyzed in scenes from Milos Forman’s Amadeus and The Imitation Game directed by Morten Tyldum.
Sept. 21 Realism and Expressionism
Contrast the traditional storytelling, realistic historic settings, and “invisible” camerawork and editing of Downton Abbey—all suited to its subject—with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a dictionary of modernist cinema in which flashbacks, shifting points of view, and virtuoso shooting and editing capture the brash contradictions of the central character.
Oct. 5 The Tramp and the Fool: Ideas In Film
Studio head Sam Goldwyn said “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Movies are full of ideas—but audiences want them saturated in feelings and sensations, and prefer visual thinking to sermons. Examine how Chaplin’s Modern Times and Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday use the unique takes on comedy of their directors (who are also its stars) as vehicles for ideas.
Oct. 19 Shakespeare vs. Film
When Shakespeare meets the screen, the result can be a collision or a fascinating journey on the borders of film and theatre. Look at Macbeth’s encounter with witches as Shakespeare wrote it, then as envisioned by Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood and Roman Polanski in Macbeth, each with a different cinematic mix of prophecy, fate, irony, fear, and evil.
4 sessions
Image above: Makeup is applied to transform actor F. Murray Abraham into Salieri in the 1984 film Amadeus (Photo: ShotOnSet!)
