Called "the seventh art," film has a long tradition of serious popular appreciation and academic study in France. This course will offer an overview of French cinema, including the origins of film (Lumière brothers, Méliès), the inventive silent period (which created such avant-garde classics as Un chien andalou), the poetic realism of the 30s, the difficulties of the war years, the post-war emphasis on historical/nationalist themes in the "tradition of quality" films, the French New Wave's attempt to create a more "cinematic" style, the effects of the political turmoil of May '68 on film culture, the "art house" reception of French films in the US, and the broader appeal of recent hyper-visual ("cinéma du look") films, such as La Femme Nikita and Amélie. While the primary focus of the course will be on French cinema, we will also discuss the reciprocal influences between American and French film culture, both in terms of formal influences on filmmaking and theoretical approaches to film studies.

How do art films tell stories? The dominant storytelling genre of the contemporary festival circuit, the art film has since World War Two combined "realist" and "modernist" impulses. Influenced by Italian neorealism, art films grant priority to characters from working class, sexual, and other exploited and imperiled minorities. Drawing on the fine arts, literature and music, art films also experiment with modernist themes and formal principles, such as subjectivity, duration, serial structure, denotative ambiguity and reflexivity. This course explores art cinema from a variety of national contexts, analyzing storytelling techniques and themes that challenge the "economical" and diverting forms associated with mainstream commercial filmmaking.