A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum Draft 0.1 for critique | Four semesters | 56 weeks | Primarily pre-1975 Purpose. This draft is designed for an adult independent learner with a substantial general humanities background and informal familiarity with post-1975 American film, but no formal education in film studies. It is not intended as a definitive canon. It is a working curriculum intended to improve through criticism. Design principles. Chronology provides the skeleton, but the organizing question is inheritance: what does a film receive from earlier cinema, what does it transform or reject, and what later filmmakers inherit from it? The curriculum integrates formal analysis, history, theory, international cinema, political context, and selective canonical gap-filling. Feedback especially requested: films that are missing, expendable or misplaced; questionable influence claims; better readings; useful syllabi; book chapters, essays, journal articles, criticism or primary sources; recorded lectures, interviews, documentaries and podcasts; and legitimate free online viewing sources. Access principle. The eventual revision will prioritize libraries, public-domain and archival sources, and legitimate free streaming. A 'Watch Free' field will be added where a stable legal source can be verified. This draft intentionally leaves many reading and access fields provisional so knowledgeable readers can recommend stronger material. Optional enrichment. Selected weeks include an 'At the Table' food, wine or beer component when it adds historical or cultural context. It is optional and secondary to the film curriculum. How to read each week Watch identifies the primary film or clips. Focus identifies the formal or historical problem. Upstream names important inheritances. Downstream indicates later consequences. Reading / prompt gives a starter text or the question the eventual bibliography should answer. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 2 Semester I: Inventing the Language 1895-1941 | How cinema learned to tell us where to look Week 1. Before anybody knew the rules Watch: Lumiere selections; Georges Melies selections; The Great Train Robbery (1903) Focus: Shot, cut, framing, camera position, actuality versus spectacle. Upstream: Photography, theater, magic shows, vaudeville. Downstream: Effects-driven fantasy and narrative cinema. Reading / prompt: Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions." Week 2. Narrative grammar and its poisoned legacy Watch: D. W. Griffith shorts including A Corner in Wheat; substantial selections from The Birth of a Nation; counterpoint clips from Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Focus: Cross-cutting, close-up, parallel action, narrative suspense; technical achievement and racist propaganda. Upstream: Melodrama and earlier editing experiments. Downstream: Classical Hollywood narrative; Black filmmakers responding to Griffith. Reading / prompt: Pair Griffith-era formal history with Black critical responses and scholarship on race and early cinema. Week 3. Chaplin builds a character Watch: The Immigrant (1917); The Kid (1921); The Gold Rush (1925) Focus: Performance within the frame, pathos, visual comedy, star persona. Upstream: Music hall and vaudeville. Downstream: Physical comedy and comic antiheroes. Reading / prompt: Starter reading: a concise Chaplin/film comedy chapter. At the Table: deliberately modest comfort food. Week 4. Keaton builds a universe Watch: Sherlock Jr. (1924); The General (1926) Focus: Spatial coherence, long shot, stunt performance, editing, cinema about cinema. Upstream: Vaudeville and early screen comedy. Downstream: Action comedy and filmmakers who construct jokes through physical space. Reading / prompt: Compare Keaton's spatial logic with Chaplin's character-centered comedy. Week 5. The image stops being realistic Watch: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920); Nosferatu (1922) Focus: Mise-en-scene, set design, light, distortion, Weimar cinema. Upstream: German Expressionist painting and theater. Downstream: Universal horror, film noir, Hitchcock, Burton, Lynch. Reading / prompt: At the Table: German dinner; dry German Riesling as an introduction to acidity, sweetness and body. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 3 Week 6. Editing becomes an argument Watch: Battleship Potemkin (1925); selected Eisenstein sequences; selected Leni Riefenstahl sequences from Triumph of the Will (1935) Focus: Montage, political persuasion, mass choreography, spectacle, propaganda. Upstream: Griffith's parallel editing. Downstream: Political cinema, advertising, propaganda aesthetics, later debates about fascist spectacle. Reading / prompt: Sergei Eisenstein on montage. Riefenstahl is a focused case study, not a full-film endorsement or isolated aesthetic exercise. Week 7. The silent image reaches maturity Watch: Sunrise (1927); The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Focus: Mobile camera versus face; expression versus apparent realism. Upstream: Mature silent-era visual storytelling. Downstream: Art cinema and expressive cinematography. Reading / prompt: Question: how much can cinema communicate without dialogue? Week 8. Sound is not merely talking Watch: M (1931); selected historical clips from The Jazz Singer (1927) Focus: Off-screen sound, silence, voice, sound bridges. Upstream: Expressionism and silent visual storytelling. Downstream: Modern sound design and suspense. Reading / prompt: At the Table: German beer comparison, such as Helles, Pilsner and Weissbier. Week 9. Chaplin refuses the new language Watch: City Lights (1931) Focus: Technological change, pantomime, music and artistic resistance. Upstream: Silent comedy. Downstream: Filmmakers who selectively resist dominant technologies. Reading / prompt: Question: why make an essentially silent film after Hollywood adopts sound? Week 10. Hollywood perfects verbal velocity Watch: It Happened One Night (1934); Bringing Up Baby (1938) Focus: Screwball comedy, dialogue, rhythm, gender and censorship. Upstream: Stage comedy. Downstream: Romantic comedy and rapid-fire screen dialogue. Reading / prompt: Starter reading: scholarship on screwball comedy and the Production Code. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 4 Week 11. The studio creates worlds Watch: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); selected clips from The Wizard of Oz (1939); short comparative coda from The Goonies (1985) Focus: Three-strip Technicolor, production design, action staging, star persona, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and orchestral scoring. Upstream: Swashbucklers and studio spectacle. Downstream: Spielberg-era adventure and the transmission of classical Hollywood through television culture. Reading / prompt: The Wizard of Oz is clips only because the assumed learner already knows it well. Week 12. Renoir and the moving social world Watch: The Rules of the Game (1939) Focus: Deep staging, ensemble blocking, camera movement, class. Upstream: European theatrical and cinematic traditions. Downstream: Welles, Altman and ensemble cinema. Reading / prompt: At the Table: French dinner; Beaujolais as a lesson in lighter body and lower tannin. Week 13. Ford invents an American mythology Watch: Stagecoach (1939) Focus: Landscape, genre, community, star entrance, action geography; race and the frontier myth. Upstream: Silent Westerns and frontier mythology. Downstream: Kurosawa and later Westerns; Ford's own later self-revision. Reading / prompt: Keep this film in memory: the curriculum returns to Ford repeatedly. Week 14. The synthesis Watch: Citizen Kane (1941) Focus: Deep focus, sound, nonlinear narration, lighting, production design, unreliable testimony. Upstream: Expressionism, radio, theatrical staging, Renoir and classical Hollywood. Downstream: Modern narrative and visual experimentation. Reading / prompt: Multi-angle exercise: analyze the film using the entire semester's vocabulary. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 5 Semester II: Cinema Talks Across Borders 1941-1962 | National cinemas borrowing from and reacting against one another Week 1. Noir Watch: Double Indemnity (1944); Out of the Past (1947) Focus: Lighting, voiceover, fatalism, gender, postwar anxiety. Upstream: German Expressionism, crime fiction, emigre filmmakers. Downstream: Neo-noir, including Chinatown. Reading / prompt: Starter reading: noir history and debates over whether noir is a genre, style or cycle. Week 2. Italy rejects the studio Watch: Rome, Open City (1945); Bicycle Thieves (1948) Focus: Neorealism, location shooting, nonprofessional performers, postwar material reality. Upstream: Reaction against studio artificiality and Fascist-era cinema. Downstream: Ray, the French New Wave and later realist traditions. Reading / prompt: At the Table: simple Roman meal; Sangiovese and food-friendly acidity. Week 3. Hollywood artifice turned up to eleven Watch: Black Narcissus (1947); The Red Shoes (1948) Focus: Color as expressive language; design and emotional artifice. Upstream: Studio production and theatrical spectacle. Downstream: Stylized art cinema and later color design. Reading / prompt: Counterpoint to neorealism: why should realism have privileged access to truth? Week 4. Kurosawa before the samurai Watch: Rashomon (1950); Ikiru (1952) Focus: Subjective narration, movement, weather, composition. Upstream: Ford, silent cinema, Soviet montage, European art cinema and Japanese traditions. Downstream: Global art cinema and later nonlinear narration. Reading / prompt: Reading should explicitly address Kurosawa's transnational influences. Week 5. Ford and Kurosawa Watch: My Darling Clementine (1946); begin Seven Samurai (1954); selected Stagecoach revisiting Focus: Landscape, group formation, action geography, masculine codes. Upstream: Ford's Western grammar. Downstream: Kurosawa's transformation of Western forms. Reading / prompt: Major influence unit: Ford -> Kurosawa. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 6 Week 6. The influence comes home Watch: Finish Seven Samurai; selected sequences from The Magnificent Seven (1960) Focus: Remake, translation, genre circulation. Upstream: Kurosawa's synthesis of Japanese and Western influences. Downstream: American Westerns and ensemble action cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: what changes when a story crosses cultures twice? Week 7. Hitchcock and controlled looking Watch: Notorious (1946); Rear Window (1954) Focus: Point of view, audience knowledge, voyeurism, objects as narrative devices. Upstream: Expressionism, silent storytelling, suspense traditions. Downstream: Modern thrillers and theories of spectatorship. Reading / prompt: Starter reading: Hitchcock/Truffaut selections plus later critical work. Week 8. Ozu refuses the Western grammar Watch: Tokyo Story (1953) Focus: Low camera, ellipsis, stillness, domestic space. Upstream: Japanese traditions and a selective relationship to classical continuity. Downstream: International art cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: what happens when a major filmmaker organizes space differently from Hollywood? Week 9. The Western interrogates itself Watch: The Searchers (1956) Focus: Race, violence, family, landscape, doorways, belonging. Upstream: Stagecoach and Ford's earlier frontier mythology. Downstream: Revisionist Westerns. Reading / prompt: Compare John Wayne's Ringo Kid with Ethan Edwards; self-revision by an auteur. Week 10. Hitchcock destabilizes himself Watch: Vertigo (1958) Focus: Identification, obsession, looking, moral instability. Upstream: Hitchcock's earlier control of spectator identification. Downstream: Psychological thrillers and later films about obsessive spectatorship. Reading / prompt: Theory-heavy week. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 7 Week 11. Ray and another modernity Watch: Pather Panchali (1955); Aparajito (1956) Focus: Childhood, observation, humanism, Indian modernity. Upstream: Bengali culture, literary adaptation and affinities with neorealism. Downstream: Global art cinema. Reading / prompt: Avoid reducing Ray to 'Indian neorealism.' Week 12. The French critics become filmmakers Watch: The 400 Blows (1959); Breathless (1960) Focus: Jump cuts, location shooting, cinephilia, authorship. Upstream: Hitchcock, Hawks, American B movies, Italian neorealism. Downstream: Auteur theory and New Hollywood. Reading / prompt: Introduce Cahiers du Cinema and auteur theory explicitly. Week 13. Antonioni removes the event Watch: L'Avventura (1960) Focus: Duration, absence, alienation, space. Upstream: Neorealism and modernist literature. Downstream: Slow cinema and modernist art film. Reading / prompt: Question: what happens when conventional narrative stops satisfying us? Week 14. Varda changes the New Wave story Watch: Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) Focus: Real time, gender, looking, documentary/fiction boundary. Upstream: New Wave methods and documentary observation. Downstream: Feminist and essayistic cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: what disappears if the New Wave is narrated only through Godard and Truffaut? A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 8 Semester III: Cinema Turns on Itself 1962-1975 | Modernism, politics, genre revision and theory Week 1. Ford buries the Western legend Watch: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Focus: Myth, history, print-the-legend logic, aging genre. Upstream: Stagecoach and The Searchers. Downstream: Revisionist Westerns. Reading / prompt: Compare Ford across 1939, 1956 and 1962. Week 2. The auteur looks in the mirror Watch: 8 1/2 (1963) Focus: Reflexivity, memory, fantasy, authorship. Upstream: Fellini's neorealist beginnings. Downstream: Self-reflexive auteur cinema. Reading / prompt: Reading: auteur theory plus a critical challenge to it. Week 3. Godard attacks the machinery he loves Watch: Contempt (1963) Focus: Art, commerce, authorship, adaptation. Upstream: Classical Hollywood and New Wave cinephilia. Downstream: Modernist films about filmmaking. Reading / prompt: Pair with writing on industrial authorship. Week 4. Cinema as political weapon Watch: The Battle of Algiers (1966) Focus: Political cinema, documentary aesthetics, constructed realism. Upstream: Neorealism and newsreel form. Downstream: Political thrillers and docudrama. Reading / prompt: Question: how does fiction acquire documentary authority? Week 5. Bergman breaks the apparatus Watch: Persona (1966) Focus: Identity, performance, film materiality. Upstream: European modernism. Downstream: Self-conscious art cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: what happens when the movie reminds us it is a movie? A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 9 Week 6. Sembene and decolonizing cinema Watch: Black Girl (1966) Focus: Colonial gaze, labor, language, representation. Upstream: African literary and anti-colonial traditions. Downstream: Postcolonial cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: who historically possessed the camera? Week 7. Hollywood's rules collapse Watch: Bonnie and Clyde (1967); The Graduate (1967) Focus: Editing, sexuality, violence, youth culture, popular music. Upstream: French New Wave, gangster film, classical Hollywood. Downstream: New Hollywood. Reading / prompt: Read on the Production Code's collapse and changing audiences. Week 8. Horror escapes Hollywood Watch: Night of the Living Dead (1968) Focus: Independent production, social breakdown, race, horror form. Upstream: Classical horror. Downstream: Modern independent horror and social allegory. Reading / prompt: Consider production/distribution context. Week 9. Leone sends the Western back across the Atlantic Watch: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Focus: Quotation, ritual, landscape, genre memory. Upstream: Ford, Hawks, Kurosawa and American Western iconography. Downstream: Revisionist Western and postmodern genre cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: celebration, parody, mourning, or all three? Week 10. Hollywood receives the altered Western back Watch: The Wild Bunch (1969) Focus: Editing, violence, aging masculinity, end-of-era mythology. Upstream: Ford, Kurosawa and Leone. Downstream: Later revisionist Westerns. Reading / prompt: Close analysis of the opening and final shootout. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 10 Week 11. Fascism made beautiful Watch: The Conformist (1970); return to selected Riefenstahl material; optional selected Olympia (1938) sequences Focus: Political aesthetics, architecture, sexuality, cinematography; beauty and authoritarian spectacle. Upstream: Fascist aesthetics and postwar reckoning. Downstream: Later visual stylization in American and European cinema. Reading / prompt: Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism,' paired with historical scholarship rather than treated as the final word. At the Table: Northern Italian meal; Barbera. Week 12. African modernism refuses our categories Watch: Touki Bouki (1973) Focus: Postcolonial modernism, fragmentation, desire, migration. Upstream: New Wave and African cinema. Downstream: Contemporary African art cinema. Reading / prompt: Question: what happens when 'world cinema' does not explain itself to a Western viewer? Week 13. Noir digs up its own corpse Watch: Chinatown (1974) Focus: Neo-noir, historical critique, corruption, fatalism. Upstream: Double Indemnity and Out of the Past. Downstream: Modern neo-noir. Reading / prompt: Return explicitly to Semester II Week 1. Week 14. Akerman changes duration Watch: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Focus: Domestic labor, repetition, duration, feminist spectatorship. Upstream: Realism, modernism and feminist criticism. Downstream: Slow cinema and feminist film practice. Reading / prompt: Reading: feminist film theory, with Mulvey placed in conversation rather than isolation. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 11 Semester IV: Canon, Counter-Canon and the Missing Movies A pre-1975 excavation that tests the analytical toolkit Week 1. Keaton after Keaton Watch: The Cameraman (1928) Focus: Apply spatial analysis without being prompted shot by shot. Upstream: Sherlock Jr. and The General. Downstream: Later visual/action comedy. Reading / prompt: Independent analysis exercise. Week 2. Chaplin encounters industrial modernity Watch: Modern Times (1936) Focus: Machines, labor, sound and comic resistance. Upstream: City Lights and silent comedy. Downstream: Workplace satire and technological comedy. Reading / prompt: Read on Chaplin, labor and modernity. Week 3. Hawks and invisible authorship Watch: His Girl Friday (1940) Focus: Overlapping dialogue, tempo, relationships, invisible style. Upstream: Screwball comedy. Downstream: Auteur debates about directors without conspicuous visual signatures. Reading / prompt: Use this to test auteur theory. Week 4. Comedy criticizes Hollywood Watch: Sullivan's Travels (1941) Focus: Reflexivity, comedy and social obligation. Upstream: Screwball and Depression-era comedy. Downstream: Movies about movies. Reading / prompt: Question: what obligations does entertainment have toward suffering? Week 5. Welles after Kane Watch: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) Focus: Authorship versus studio power. Upstream: Citizen Kane. Downstream: Debates over the auteur and industrial control. Reading / prompt: Study the film's production history without pretending a lost cut can be reconstructed with certainty. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 12 Week 6. Classical Hollywood makes itself disappear Watch: Casablanca (1942), deliberate rewatch Focus: Blocking, entrances/exits, eyelines, reaction shots, music, information flow. Upstream: Classical continuity and Warner Bros. studio craft. Downstream: Invisible style. Reading / prompt: Assignment: track one Rick's Cafe sequence shot by shot. Rewatch earns its place through technique. Week 7. Noir looks at Hollywood Watch: Sunset Boulevard (1950) Focus: Industry memory, stardom, narration, decay. Upstream: Noir and silent Hollywood. Downstream: Hollywood self-critique. Reading / prompt: Read on star image and industry history. Week 8. Performance changes Watch: On the Waterfront (1954) Focus: Method acting, location, politics. Upstream: Classical star performance. Downstream: Postwar American acting. Reading / prompt: Kazan and HUAC are central context, not footnotes. Week 9. American Gothic Watch: The Night of the Hunter (1955) Focus: Expressionist lighting, fairy tale, religious imagery, performance. Upstream: Caligari, silent cinema and noir. Downstream: American Gothic and stylized horror. Reading / prompt: Question: why does a 1955 American film sometimes look as if Expressionism never went away? Week 10. Wilder dismantles gender conventions Watch: Some Like It Hot (1959) Focus: Performance, gender, censorship, genre collision. Upstream: Screwball and gangster films. Downstream: Later gender comedy. Reading / prompt: Read historically, while allowing contemporary critical perspectives. A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 13 Week 11. Preminger tests censorship Watch: Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Focus: Adult subject matter, jazz, courtroom genre, weakening Production Code. Upstream: Classical courtroom drama. Downstream: More permissive 1960s American cinema. Reading / prompt: Supporting media: Duke Ellington score context. Week 12. Monumental cinema and empire Watch: Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Focus: Widescreen composition, landscape, spectacle, star image, imperial gaze. Upstream: Epic cinema and colonial adventure. Downstream: Modern blockbuster spectacle. Reading / prompt: Best watched on the largest good screen available. Week 13. Kubrick weaponizes genre Watch: Dr. Strangelove (1964); brief comparative clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey because the assumed learner has seen it Focus: Black comedy, institutions, war-film conventions. Upstream: Cold War thriller and war cinema. Downstream: Political satire. Reading / prompt: The 2001 clip is comparative evidence, not another full assignment. Week 14. The Western as final examination Watch: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Focus: Genre deconstruction, sound, commerce, landscape, anti-heroism. Upstream: Stagecoach -> Kurosawa -> The Searchers -> Liberty Valance -> Leone -> Peckinpah. Downstream: Later anti-Westerns. Reading / prompt: Final question: what happened to the Western between John Wayne's entrance in Stagecoach and Warren Beatty disappearing into the snow? A Two-Year Self-Directed Film Studies Curriculum | Draft 0.1 14 Recurring analytical record For each week, the learner keeps a short record under six headings: 1. Upstream: What does this film inherit? 2. Intervention: What does it change, reject, expose or perfect? 3. Formal focus: What should I actually watch and listen for? 4. Downstream: Where does this language go next? 5. Reading: What argument does the critic make, and do I buy it? 6. At the Table: If used, what did the food or drink add to the cultural context? A separate influence map should develop alongside the syllabus. Examples include Expressionism -> Lang -> noir -> neo-noir; Ford -> Kurosawa -> Leone -> revisionist Western; neorealism -> French New Wave -> New Hollywood; Griffith -> Eisenstein -> political montage and propaganda debates; classical Hollywood -> Cahiers/auteur theory -> New Wave -> New Hollywood. Questions for reviewers Where is this curriculum reproducing a conventional canon without sufficient pedagogical reason? Which filmmakers, national cinemas, movements, or theoretical traditions are materially underrepresented? Which claimed influence relationships need qualification or correction? Which films should be replaced by clips so another work can enter? Which readings would you actually assign to an intelligent independent learner? If you taught or took a particularly strong course touching one of these units, what syllabus or reading list should this project consult? Revision note Draft 0.1. Planned Draft 0.2 work: incorporate external critique; build a week-by-week bibliography; verify legitimate free viewing links; add supporting lectures and podcasts; and distinguish essential full viewings from comparative clips.