American cinema – Catherine Russell

This course will explore the history of American cinema from the early 1930s to the early 1960s, tracing the career of Barbara Stanwyck who made 84 films from 1927 to 1964, and worked with many of the top directors, in many different genres. Because she was not tied to any single studio, her career offers a unique picture of the Hollywood studio system. In this course students will engage with the critical debates around classicism, gender and genre as they have developed in film studies since the 1970s. Stanwyck arguably challenged the norms for women actors throughout her career, finally transforming herself from film star to TV star, and working until the age of 80. This course will present students with a range of methods of analysis for studio-based films, including star studies, gender, genre, set and fashion design, industry history, reception theory and performance studies, using Stanwyck as a guide and as a means of bringing these various methodologies together. This approach to Hollywood will acquaint students with the heterogeneity of the classical cinema within the terms of American cultural studies, and as a site where gender is constantly under construction, deconstruction and reinvention.

Topics in Film History: American Cinema of the 1950s.

Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in decline, even while it produced some of the strongest films of its history. With the rise of independent productions, the competition of TV, and major shifts in the social fabric, American cinema was dramatically changed during this decade. In this course we will examine the social and cultural climate of the HUAC trials and the Cold War, the civil rights movement, suburbanism and popular Freudianism. We will focus on three key genres of the decade: the family melodrama, the Western, and film noir in order to examine how the changing social formation was negotiated ideologically through narrative cinema. This decade of American cinema has become a central focus of nostalgic discourses on American culture. One of the questions that will be addressed in the course concerns the relationship of film style (including performance, mise en scene and film aesthetics) to the social anxieties that are so dramatically represented during this period. In thirteen weeks we cannot comprehensively cover all the important elements of film culture of the era, although students are invited through presentations and papers to extend their research beyond the parameters of the syllabus.