Course: Evolution of Cinema

Film Studies MA Core Course 1st Year Semester 1

Course Coordinator: Rajan Krishnan
Adjunct Faculty: Abhija Ghosh
Course Code: ECA
Venue: CR 407
Schedule: Monday: 9am-11am; Tuesday: 11.15am- 1.15pm
Assessment:

Class Participation- 30%

Response Papers-40%
End Term Paper- 30%

WEEK 1
LECTURE 1 & 2- Introduction: Beginning of Cinema
Siegfried Kracauer, Basic Concepts in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 27-41.
CLIPS: Lumiere Films, Kinetoscope Films/ George Melies, A Trip to the Moon (1902)
WEEK 2
LECTURE 3 & 4 - Early CinemaTom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde in
Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Early Cinema Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film
Institute, 1990, 56-62.
Film: Edwin S. Porter The Great Train Robbery (1903)
WEEK 3
LECTURE 5 - The Silent Film Form
Bela Balzacs, The Close-Up, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen & Leo Braudy Eds. Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992, 260-267
Clips: D.W. Griffith The Birth of a Nation (1915)/ Intolerance (1916)

LECTURE 6- Indian Silent Cinema

Suresh Chabria, D.G. Phalke and the Melies Tradition in Early Indian Cinema, Kintop 2.
Frankfurt am Main, 1993, 103-115.
CLIPS: D.G. Phalke Raja Harishchandra 1913/Kaliya Mardan 1919; Shivendra
Dungarpur Celluloid Man (2013); Paresh Mokashi Harishchandrachi Factory (2009)
Suggested Reading: Eric Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Three Get Started in Indian Film:
2nd Edition. New York, Oxford, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980, 59-71. *

WEEK 4
LECTURE 7&8 - Soviet Montage
Sergei Eisenstein, A Dialectic Approach to Film Form in Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory, Edited and Translated by Jay Leyda, San Diego, New York, London: A
harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers: 1977, 45-63.
Suggested Reading:
Bill Nichols, Battleship Potemkin (1926), Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form and Revolution in
Jeffrey Geiger & R.L. Rutsky, ed. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. New York, London: WW
Norton & Company, 2005, 158-177.
Film: Sergei Eisenstein Strike (1925) or Battleship Potemkin (1927)

WEEK 5
LECTURE 9 - German Expressionism
Siegfried Kracauer, Caligari in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the
German Film, Princeton University Press, 1966, 61-77.
Suggested Reading: Paul Coates, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Jeffrey Geiger & R.L.
Rutsky, ed. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. New York, London: WW Norton & Company,
2005, 98-117.
Screening: Robert Weine The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
WEEK 6- Cinema and Mass Culture- 1
LECTURE 10 & 11
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations

WEEK 7 - Cinema and Mass Culture -2

LECTURE 12
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, London and England: Harvard University Press, 1995, 75-86.
The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies (1927)
CLIPS: Dziga Vertov Man with the Movie Camera (1929)/ Walter Ruttman Berlin
Symphony of a Big City (1927)
WEEK 8 Hollywood Genres 1
LECTURE 13 - Classical Hollywood
David Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures, in
Philip Rosen, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press,
1986, 17-34.
FILM: Michael Curtiz Casablanca 1942
WEEK 9 Documentary
LECTURE 14
Michael Renov, The Truth about Non Fiction in Theorizing Documentary, AFI Film
Readers, New York and London: Routledge, 1993, 1-11.
CLIPS- Robert Flaherty Nanook of the North (1922) , Dziga Vertov Man with the Movie
Camera (1929) , Films Division I am 20 (1967)

WEEK 10- Language of Cinema

LECTURE 15
Andre Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema in What is Cinema Vol.1,
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California press: 1967, 23-40.
Suggested Reading: James Naemore, Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles: The Magician and
the Mass Media in Jeffrey Geiger & R.L. Rutsky ed. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader.New
York, London: WW Norton & Company, 2005, 340-360.
Screening: Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1945)

WEEK 11- Realism in Cinema

LECTURE 16 - Post War Scenario
Simona Monticelli, Italian Post war Cinema and Neo Realism in John Hill and Pamela
Church Gibson, eds. Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press: 1998, 455-460
Screening: Roberto Rosselini Rome Open, City (1945)
WEEK 12- Realism Debates
LECTURE 17 Influence of Neo-Realism
Andre Bazin, An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the
Liberation in What is Cinema Vol. II, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press: 1971, 16-40.
CLIPS- Vittorio De Sica Bicycle Thieves (1948) , Bimal Roy Do Bigha Zameen (1953),
Satyajit Ray The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959)