Details
INSTRUCTOR: Elizabeth Hanly
SECTION: RVH
SCHEDULE: Online
Course Description
While much of the world celebrates the work of the great film-makers of the U.S.A, France, Germany, and Japan, extraordinary filmmaking has been accomplished, often in nearly impossible circumstances, across the Third World. This course will examine some of those films. It sets out to focus equally on the artist's values in a film, as well as the film’s social-political and historical context. How then do these filmmakers work with camera, light, sound, and direction to tell their stories? What were the political and cultural circumstances in the country at the time the film was made? How difficult was it to make the film, in both political and economic terms? What is the film telling us about subtle as well as more obvious cultural concerns and realities? How was the film received in-country? How was it received internationally? How might it inform our understanding of these countries today? This course poses still more questions. Do different cultures approach “narrative” structure differently? What is the role of the story-teller and the madman in film in various countries? Are some techniques that we identify as ironically ‘American’ far more international than we realize? Have some of Hollywood’s greatest directors –Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, been out-Hitchcocked, by great Egyptian directors like Youssef Chanhine? This course will look at films from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Turkey et al.