Long, long ago, I posted the the filmography from the “canon” exam that Yale’s Film Studies Ph.D. program administers to all of its graduating students. I promised to post the readings, too, and then promptly forgot. Anyway, here they are, in case you’re interested in some light reading. Apologies for the formatting errors; I didn’t have the wherewithal to clean this list up.
I. Non-fiction Modes of Film
a. Documentary and Ethnographic
Phil Rosen, “Document and Documentary: on the Persistence of Historical Concepts” in Rosen, Change Mummified
Trinh Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning:” in Renov
Brian Winston, “The Documentary film as Scientific Inscription” in Renov
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye (“We: Variant of a Manifesto”; “Kinoks: A Revolution”; “On the Significance of Non-Acted Cinema”; “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye”)
b. animation (to be decided)
c. Experimental
Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors On Vision”
Sitney, P.A “Major Mythopoeia” from Visionary Cinema
Maya Deren An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film
Annette Michelson. “About Snow.” October, No. 8 (Spring 1979): 111–24.
II. Institutions
a. Hollywood and beyond
Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema
Bacher, Lutz. “Letter from an Unknown Woman” in Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios
James Lastra, chapter 4 from Sound Technology and the American Cinema
Thomas Schatz, from The Genius of the System, Parts I and II.
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing film studies
Vance Kepley, “Whose Apparatus: Problems of Film Exhibition and History” in Post Theory
N. Durovicova, “Local Ghosts: Dubbing Bodies In Early Sound Cinema,” In Film and its Multiples (Udine: Forum, 2003), 83-98
III. Cultural Studies/Film History
a. Early Cinema
Miriam Hansen, “Introduction” from Babel and Babylon
Yuri Tsivian, part I (pp. 1-121) of Early Cinema in Russia
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions”; “’Animated Pictures’: Tales from Cinema’s Forgotten Future,” in Reinventing Film Studies,
A. Gerow,“The Benshi’s New Face: Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan,” Iconics
Charles Musser, “Pre-Classical American Cinema: Its Changing Modes of Film Production,” in Abel, Silent Film (Rutgers University Press, 1996), 85-108.
b. Race and ethnicity
Manthia Diawara, M. “Black Resistant Spectators”
Jane Gaines. “On Looking Relations”
Clyde Taylor, from Oscar Micheaux and his Circle
Richard Dyer, “White”
IV. Film Theory Topics
Except where noted via brackets ([ ]), selections taken from
Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, Leo Braudy (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ Press)
Summary of Debates
Francesco Casetti Theories of Film 1945-95
Bordwell, “Convention, Construction and Cinematic Vision,” Post Theory
1. Film and Reality
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? v. 1
Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement Image ch 1-4; Cinema 2: the Time Image, ch 1.
Siegfried Kracauer, “Basic Concepts”; “The Establishment of Physical Existence”
Rudolf Arnheim, “Film and Reality”; “The Complete Film”
Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film”
2. Film Language and Style
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cinema of Poetry”
David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film , part III
Jean Mitry, “Rhythm and Montage” [Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema]
Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot” and “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema”
Nick Browne, “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach”
Raymond, Bellour, “The Obvious and the Code” [Rosen, Narrative Apparatus Ideol]
Noel Burch, Chapter One of Theory of Film Practice
Dudley Andrew, “André Bazin’s ‘Evolution’” [in Defining Cinema].
3. Sound and Image
Pascal Bonitzer, “Silence of the Voice” [in Rosen]
Jean Epstein, “Photogenie” [Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism I]
Jacques Aumont, “The Face in Close Up” [Dalle Vacche, The Visual Turn]
Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” [Image Music Text]
Michel Chion, “Projections of Sound on Image” [Audio-Vision]
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”
Bela Balazs, “The Close-up” and “The Face of Man”
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound”
Eisenstein, “Sound and Image (Montage 1938)” [in The Film Sense]
4. Media and Adaptation
Bazin, “Cinema as Digest” [Naremore: On Adaptation]
Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today” [in The Film Sense]
D. Andrew, “Adaptation”; “Echoes of Art in Orson Welles” [Film in the Aura of Art]
Noel Carroll, “The Specificity Thesis”
Stanley Cavell, “Photograph and Screen” from The World Viewed
Garrett Stewart “Frame of Reference” [from Between Film and Screen]
Vivian Sobchack,“The Scene of the Screen:Envisioning Presence’”
5. Genre
Jean-Loup Bourget, “Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres”
Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur”
Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment”
Solanas and Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema” [in Robert Stam, ed., Film Theory]
Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema” [in Stam]
Lyotard, “Acinema” [in Rosen]
Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” [in Film/Genre]
6. Auteurs and Stars
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”
Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory”
John Ellis, “Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon”
Richard Dyer, from Stars
7. Ideological Analysis
Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” [in Rosen]
Heath, “Narrative Space” [in Rosen]
Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma, “Young Mr. Lincoln” [in Rosen]
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
J-L Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
F Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” [from Signatures of the Visible]
8.Subjectivity, Gender
Christian Metz, “Identification,” “Mirror” “The Passion for Perceiving” from Imaginary Signifier
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator”
Gaylyn Studlar, “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema”
Thanks so much. I studied with David and Michael R. back in the days of Xeroxed packets. I’ve been hoping to reconstruct this list! This is a big help. Anyone out there know the name of the article on Rita Hayworth and fame?
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