HUM 1045 - American Film

Credits: 3
Hours/Week: Lecture None Lab None
Course Description: Film is not only for entertainment, it is also an art form, a technology, an industry, and a medium of communication and expression. This course presents a survey of the history of film in the United States, and is intended to improve visual literacy so that students will understand and think about film in an intelligent and critical way. The entire history of American films is studied, from the early moving-picture inventions up to the digital revolution. Included in this course are representative examples of major American filmmakers, film genres, film theories, film techniques, and the historical and cultural events that were related to production, exhibition, styles, and the content of films in the United States from 1895 to the present.
MnTC Goals
6 Humanities/Fine Arts, 7 Human Diversity

Prerequisite(s): None
Corequisite(s): None
Recommendation: None

Major Content

1. Origins of the cinema
   1. Optical principles
   2. Series photography
   3. Motion pictures
   4. Continuity editing
2. D. W. Griffith
   1. Narrative form
   2. The Birth of a Nation
   3. Intolerance
3. Hollywood in the 1920s
   1. Studio system production
   2. The silent era
4. The sound film and studio system
   1. Production code
   2. Structure of the sound studio
   3. Major directors of early sound films
5. Orson Welles and Citizen Kane
6. Film noir and post-war genres
7. Alfred Hitchcock
8. 1950s and 1960s films
   1. Color
   2. Widescreen
   3. 3-D
   4. Genres
9. 1970 - 1990s films
   1. Independent production
   2. Avant-garde films
   3. Hollywood economics
   4. The Block Buster
10. Digital Cinema
    1. Computer animation
    2. Industrial Light and Magic

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the scientific and cultural origins of the film industry in the United States.
2. Identify the silent film pioneers and their major works.
3. Describe how film form and content changed over the course of the development of the film industry in the United States.
4. Recognize the major ways in which films in the United States reflected social concerns, such as racism, war, poverty, feminism, and relationships.
5. List the major genres of films produced in the United States and their most relevant times in history.
6. Identify the elements of mise-en-scene and editing that create meaning in viewers.
7. Recognize how visual literacy helps a viewer deconstruct the means by which a film imparts messages.
8. Recognize how the form of film production and exhibition changed over the past century, and how those changes reflected and influenced American cultural and scientific progress.
9. List the cultural and historic events that were major factors leading to the production of certain films in the United States, and how the film industry was influenced by those events.
10. Name the major early filmmakers who created the film industry in the United States and their earliest, most influential films.
11. Identify specific films as examples of film types and genres epitomizing the traditional cinema of the United States at specific times in the history of the film industry.
12. Articulate an informed personal reaction to films of various genres and types of American cinema.

06. 02. Understand those works as expressions of individual and human values within an historical and social context.

06. 03. Respond critically to works in the arts and humanities.

06. 05. Articulate an informed personal reaction to works in the arts and humanities.
Competency 2 (7-10)
07. 01. Understand the development of and the changing meanings of group identities in the United States’ history and culture.

07. 04. Describe and discuss the experience and contributions (political, social, economic, etc.) of the many groups that shape American society and culture, in particular those groups that have suffered discrimination and exclusion.

07. 05. Demonstrate communication skills necessary for living and working effectively in a society with great population diversity.

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