10683 History of the Cinema II: 1940-1980 1

Credits: 6 intermediate credits in Film Studies

Prerequisites: none

Recommended: Understanding Movies: Introduction to the Art of Cinema, History of the Cinema I: 1895-1939

Authors: Dganit Borovsky, Shmuel Duvdevani, Ori Levin, Sandra Meiri, Inbar Shaham, Avner Shavit, Yael Shuv. The materials include a translation (by Y. Sadeh) of chapters 11-17 of A Short History of the Movies (7th ed.), by G. Mast and B.F. Kawin (Allyn & Bacon, 1999), as well as films.

The course examines American and European cinema over a period of 40 years (1940-1980), including the heyday of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s as well as the demise of the studio system, and later, the rise of the new Hollywood (artistic cinema and blockbusters in the 1970s). The course explores the overall context within which the different new Modernist waves and filmmakers developed in Europe, as well as their unique aesthetic contributions, which created a revolution in the language of cinema: Italian neo-realism after World War II (1945); the New Wave in France (including the work of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard), which dominated French cinema during most of the 1960s; the work of New British Cinema directors (including Lindsay Anderson) in the 1960s and 1970s; the work of Italian modernist film directors (Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni and P. P. Pasolini) in the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of New German Cinema directors (R. W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders). The course also looks at the work of major Eastern European and Soviet film directors between 1960 and 1980, among them Polish director Andrzej Wajda, Czech director Miloš Forman and Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as the work of major Japanese directors in the 1950s-1960s (Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu).

Topics: “Citizen Kane” by Orson Welles; The influence of television, McCarthyism and the end of the studio system; "Film Noir" and social awareness in Hollywood in the late 1940s; The work of Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and John Huston; Italian neo-realism and the work of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica; French and British cinema in the 1950s; Hollywood in transition (the 1950s); French modernism and the New Wave; New British Cinema; Italian modernism; Hollywood's renaissance; New German cinema; Japanese cinema; Eastern European and Soviet cinema.

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1In its previous version, the course was called History of the Cinema: From Classical Hollywood to Italian Neorealism,