Introduction to Film (for non-majors)

This class took place in the Price Family theatre in Accolade East Building. This is a full-sized movie theatre with a big screen. It also has a blackboard at the front, under the screen, but we can't figure out who would use it, since the teacher would have to write really, really big letters. The professor had a shaved head and wore a dark blue suit with a blue shirt and no tie (exactly the same clothes as in his picture on his York University web page). He sounded exactly like a TV movie reviewer, maybe like Roger Ebert, or maybe even Mr. Cranky in real life – except that he seemed to be happier. He spent a lot of time runiing over to the side of the room to load up DVDs of movies so he could show clips during his lecture.

The students seemed relaxed. There were about 350 of them, first and second year students, and they said the professor was a fun guy, but a little disorganized. They handed in their first writing assignment for the course at the beginning of the lecture. That took 20 minutes. The assignment was 500 words on “a cinematic experience.” The students said they had written their assignments and passed them around in tutorial class to get comments from other students, and then revised them. Now, the professor (or maybe the graduate students) would read them and make comments, and then they would revise them again.

In the lecture, the professor showed clips of a lot of different movies, to demonstrate different techniques of narration in classic Hollywood films and more experimental films. In CHC (Classic Hollywood Cinema), there are always two narrative lines: the progatoganist's public quest (maybe, the detective trying to discover who committed the crime) and the protagonist's private quest (probably a romance). He showed a scene from The Big Sleep (1946) as an example of a bit of romance: this scene between Hunphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was added after the film was made, in order to put more romance into it. Notice the "coded" way they talk about romance (this scene is famous for that), and notice that the detective's public quest is interfering with his private one.

Further, movies can tell stories by restricted narration (when the camera sees only what the main character sees; this often happens in detective stories) or unrestricted narration (where the camera, and the audience, see more than the character sees). Usually, movies do both, in a careful mixture. He showed this scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) as an example of clever mixing of restricted and unrestricted narration. Watch it carefully: when do you know only what Marnie knows, and when do you know more than she knows?

The Professor seemed to be happiest was when he would ask the class if anyone there had seen a movie he was going to show, and only a couple of hands went up. That would make him laugh.