Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0280 - Breaking the Frame: New Wave Cinemas from Italian Neorealism to Cinema Novo

This course examines the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal era of artistic innovation and revisionism in narrative filmmaking. Focusing on the cinema of this period as a cultural text and formal experiment, we will begin by exploring the importance of Italian Neorealism and continue with a close examination of modernism in European cinema focusing on key works from France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. We conclude with a foray into the Japanese New Wave and Cinema Novo in Brazil. Strong emphasis will be placed on the attempts to expand traditional film language, visual representations of social and psychological realities, and the complexities of perception. Films by Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, John Schlesinger, Vera Chytilova, Nagisa Oshima, and Glauber Rocha. KEYWORDS:New Wave cinemas, film history, film studies, European modernism

Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6-8 hours of work outside of class time per week Library Materials:I will order several films on DVD which will be placed on Hampflix (around 10 films).