MovieChat Forums > Journal d'un curé de campagne (1954) Discussion > Film class

Film class

posted 18 years ago by jewellrunner
5 replies | jump to latest

A couple of years back I took a film class in college that was really the start of my highly increased interest in film. Before the class, I knew nothing of good film. And now, as I look back, I really knew little after the class. My professor did show films such as Citizen Kane, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, and M. But he also showed movies such as Philadelphia, Do the Right Thing, The Celluoid Closet, Orlando, and Juliet of the Spirits. While the latter-mentioned are quality films, they are not ones that I would expect to make the cut for a semester long film class. My question is, if you taught an introduction film class (say, for a gen ed program), what films would you show? I think 25 is a good amount for one semester.

Personally, I would show no more than one per director, and I would try to cover all time periods. Here's what I would show:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene)
Faust (1926, F.W. Murnau)
Un chien andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel)
M (1931, Fritz Lang)
Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin)
Citizen Kane (1941, Orsen Welles)
The Raven (1943, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)
Diary of a Country Priest (1951, Robert Bresson)
12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)
The Seventh Seal (1957, Ingmar Bergman)
The 400 Blows (1959, François Truffaut)
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman)
The Conversation (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
The Passenger (1975, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Barry Lydon (1975, Stanley Kubrick)
Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)
Chungking Express (1994, Kar Wai Wong)
Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski)
A.I. (2001, Steven Spielberg)
The New World (2005, Terrence Malick)

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[–] wingsndollrdraft 16 years ago

Impressive list. Here is mine:

Diary of a Country Priest
The 400 Blows
Modern Times
It Happened One Night
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Another Woman
Taxi Driver
The Thin Man
All About My Mother
Five Easy Pieces
Rebel Without a Cause
Badlands
Metropolis
Rosemary's Baby
Vertigo or North by Northwest
Midnight Cowboy
Fanny and Alexander
Dottie Gets Spanked w/ Far From Heaven
Nashville
Laura
About Schmidt or Citizen Ruth
The Innocents
The Ice Storm
Husbands and Wives
The Passion of Joan of Arc

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[–] wingsndollrdraft 16 years ago

scratch about schmidt/citizen ruth in the relevant, well-made, contemporary film category and replace with junebug or you can count on me, both of which are even more stunning.

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[–] KubricksRube 14 years ago

I consider Juliet of the Spirits to be every bit as good as Citizen Kane or Seventh Seal, so you have miffed me somewhat.

I also think my list will be pretty similar to yours, in fact anybody with a broad knowledge of film is likely to mention a lot of the same ones. Here goes:

Birth of a Nation (or maybe Orphans of the Storm)
The Crowd
Battleship Potemkin
The General
City Lights
Sunset Boulevard
Citizen Kane
The Grapes of Wrath
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Bicycle Thieves
Psycho
8 1/2
Stalker
Mulholland Drive
Badlands
Breakfast Club
Brazil
Fargo
Hidden Fortress
Tokyo Story
The Thing
Hobgoblins
Wild World of Bat Woman
Future War
Manos: The Hands of Fate

The latter four I would show as MST3K episodes. It's important to watch bad movies, for the same reason they show those car crash film strips in drivers ed.

[–] moiestatz 14 years ago

I'd replace a few with a Romanian New Wave, like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a Dogma 95 like The Idiots, a mumblecore like Before Sunset, and maybe one by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Though I haven't watched everything on your list and the others', so maybe there are already stylistically similar films for my additions. Or perhaps a separate list for more contemporary movements and styles?

[–] jewellrunner 14 years ago

It's been 4 years and I don't stand by that list anymore, but I just have to say that Before Sunset is definitely not mumblecore.

If I did a list now, I'd cater it towards my personal tastes (because I'd be the teacher and I can do what I want):

some famous silent
some German expressionism
Menilmontant (1926)
L'atalante (1934)
Citizen Kane (1941) - if I have to
Yellow Sky (1948)
Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Vertigo (1958)
Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962)
I Fidanzati (1963)
Titicut Follies (1967)
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Days of Heaven (1978)
Stalker (1979) (or Solaris (1972))
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
some Jon Jost
Wings of Desire (1987)
some WKW
something from this century

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