ENGL 145 Exiles in Hollywood: Film Noir and the Rom Com
This course provides an introduction to film analysis with a focus on cinema exiles in early 20th-century Hollywood: a group of Jewish filmmakers driven from Europe by the rise of Nazism who settled in Los Angeles and forever changed cinema. We will study the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Michael Curtiz, and Otto Preminger, paying particular attention to how they formulated key aspects of film noir and romantic comedy. While film noir paints a bleak picture of passion, violence, and desperation in American culture, the rom com structure promises pleasure and reconciliation, transgressive zaniness wedded to social order. But films in these two contrasting genres often tell different versions of the same story, or provide entangled perspectives on related American possibilities, and we will continually compare them in order to consider issues of cinematographic technique and style, plot and tone, agency and structure, capitalism and class, gender and sexuality, as well as race and power. Throughout the course, we’ll learn to think about how these filmmakers experienced exile, and how that experience made its way into their films. In addition to coming away with a basic grasp of film history and analysis, as well as the importance of genre in the evolution of American cinema, students will also learn about the early history of Hollywood and the complex relationship between Jewishness, antifascism, and whiteness in the first half of the 20th century.
Core Requirements Met
- United States Diversity
- Fine Arts