Sections offered Spring 2022:
#5414 |
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON |
TuTh 1:15 PM–2:30 PM |
HU 108 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
Between 1967 and 1979 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of movie censorship, the decline of the Hollywood studio system, economic changes in the film industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie. An unusually large number of films from this period have become recognized as classics of the American cinema – including The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, Nashville, and Apocalypse Now – while many others are considered to represent the pinnacle of their particular genres – including Bonnie and Clyde, Klute, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. These were major works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their tumultuous times.
The films of this period reflected the era’s social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the emergence of blockbuster hits like Jaws and Star Wars in the second half of the 1970s largely ended the Hollywood studios’ embrace of more challenging films, filmmakers in this decade showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and personal relationships.
Students in this course are not expected to have any prior experience in film criticism or history – just an interest in learning to think critically about movies and American culture. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the relationship between movies, culture and society by focusing on American films of the 1970s, and through these films, to trace a path through the history of American culture during the late 20th century. The readings, screenings, assignments, and classroom activities in this course are intended to help students develop competence in critical thinking about movies, culture and society — as demonstrated through exams and short essays – and advanced skill in the writing of critical analysis and reasoned arguments – as demonstrated in formal papers. In addition to our regular classroom meetings, students will be required to view the movies to be discussed in the course. This will be take place individually, on your own schedule, by renting the movies through an available streaming service (such as Amazon or iTunes).