Tuesday, August 31

Day 1

Students received the course syllabus. We discussed some key points in it, and students were asked to read through it tonight and come to class Wednesday with questions about it.

Mr. P introduced the course briefly, stressing that we will not be watching recent films, but rather classics from the earliest cinema on up, most of them black and white, many of them silent.

Mr. P set the stage by reading to the class about a signal event in cinema history: the screening of selected shorts by the Lumiere brothers at the Grand Cafe, Paris, on December 28, 1895. We watched two of those "actualities" and then a couple of slightly later films which exploit film's capacity for creating illusions. The two poles inherent in the medium -- photographic realism and illusionistic fantasy -- went hand in hand from cinema's earliest days.

Students received a small packet of readings on early cinema.

HW due Thursday:
Read the packet handed out today and prepare for a quiz over it in class Thursday.

Thursday, June 10

We finished Bonnie and Clyde and briefly discussed the film and the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows, focusing on the film's depiction of the self-mythologization of the pair and the painful contrast between the heroic myth and the brutal reality.

Wednesday, June 9

Students took the final exam.

Tuesday, June 8

We watched more of Bonnie and Clyde, which we will finish on Thursday.

Final exam on Wednesday. See yesterday's log entry.

Monday, June 7

Mr. P announced that he would sign all Senior check-out forms on Wednesday while students are taking the final exam. That exam will take the form of three or four short clips from films, some of which students have seen, which students will analyze in terms of certain specified elements of filmcraft (cinematography, mise en scene, film editing, etc.). To prepare for the exam students should review the original "Classical Hollywood Cinema" packet one final time.

We watched more of Bonnie and Clyde.

Friday, June 4

The class and Mr. P debated whether Night and the City conformed to the "Characteristics of Film Noir" listed in the worksheet.

At the end of class we watched the very beginning of our last film, Bonnie and Clyde.

Wednesday, June 2

We briefly disucussed what students had written so far on their "Noir Characteristics" worksheet about how well Night and the City conforms to those benchmarks of film noir.

Then we watched 45 more minutes of the film.