ART 315 Film as Art

How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch.

Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films--from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacy--to demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized.

Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, filmmakers have employed a wide array of precursory aesthetic strategies in the conception and creation of their disparate works. The existence of these traditional antecedents have afforded filmmakers a diverse range of technical and artistic applications towards the construction of their respective cinematic narratives.

Both a history of film theory and an introduction to the work of the most important writers in the field, Andrew's volume reveals the bases of thought of such major theorists as Munsterberg, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Balazs, Kracauer, Bazin, Mitry, and Metz.

The art of film was borne out of scientific discovery and technological innovation. Contemporary moving image media continue to be shaped and reshaped by scientifically-inspired innovations, as we see with the rise of digital cinema, 3D, and virtual reality. But now that we have film as an art form, do the sciences continue to play a role in understanding and explaining how films are made and experienced? Embracing a 'third cultural' approach which aims to gobeyond the 'two cultures' divide memorably identified by C. P. Snow, Murray Smith seeks to bring the arts, humanities and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience.