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February 2007, Week 1

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Subject:
From:
Mike Frank <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 4 Feb 2007 12:19:22 -0500
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>>these books seem so comprehensive that I am concerned about how 
>>to use class time in a way that will not seem redundant to the students. 


they are comprehensive, in my experience  too comprehensive to 
be fully and readily assimilable,  though i have to admit that this
may be a function of the level of the enrolled students . . . mine
in general tend to be non specialist students taking my courses as a 
distribution requirement, and i find that for them B&T Intro is too
theoretical . . . the B&T History, like almost all other histories, is so 
full of names and dates, that the course can easily become one of rote
memorization with little real understanding . . . so y you may want to
play around with alternative text possibilities

but whatever text you end up using, every reading assignment is
likely to cover more stuff more superficially than is ideal . . . after
all, squeezing a century of world film history into 14 weeks is hardly
reasonable in the first place . . . so what i do is choose one little 
corner
of the reading and in class explore it carefully, slowly, and in great 
detail with many examples . . . for one obvious example, no reading of 
soviet montage theory, however careful, will suffice to give students 
who've grown up on one version or another of continuity editing a 
real sense of just how the two differ . . . an in class exercise can make 
those differences more vivid: i ask my students to collectively contrive
a brief dramatic moment and then i ask them to imagine how they
would film it, first using continuity editing and then trying --to the
extent that they can--employing something like a soviet montage
approach . . .  and i specifically ask them to include an example
of the kuleshov bit whereby the meaning of an individual shot is
generated only by virtue of its relationship to the shot that follows it
. . . all of this is very loose, of course -- remember that these are
students who have never even seen a movie camera -- but the general
principles begin to come alive in ways that no textbook can even
approximate

hope this helps

mike

----
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http://www.ScreenSite.org

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