ENG 120 Film Noir and Neo-noir

Prerequisites: None.

Summer Course Only

Course Description: A close examination of one of the most important genres to emerge in the history of American filmmaking, the course will focus on crucial movies from the 1940s and 1950s, with some attention devoted to the films that preceded and influenced film noir and the films (called Neo- noir) that have appeared in later decades.

Virtually every day of this course we will watch a movie'an old movie, usually from the 1940s or 1950s, the heyday of what is called film noir. We will derive our own definitions of film noir (whether we consider it a genre, a style, a movement, or an attitude'I am not inventing these designations; in film noir scholarship what category to put the movies in is a big, continuing controversy) from watching some of the best examples of the art form. If you have prejudices against black and white movies, you must get over them immediately. Now. Some of the best films ever produced were shot in black and white, a mode of photography that has its own beauties and unique capacities. You should start immediately noticing what you see and hear as we view these films, partly because you start your weekly journal on the first day of class, but mostly because all movies are basically arrangements of sights and sounds, relating to but never coinciding with the 'real' world. If you don't really notice what you see and hear in experiencing a film, you won't be able to deal with it in the journal assignment, but you also won't be able to interpret it or experience it fully.

Credits

1 Course Credit