HART284 - 01 - Moving Pictures:Visual Lang.

This course is about visual story-telling, about the traditions and techniques available to artists who create narratives using visual imagery as their primary vehicle of communication. Our ongoing exploration of the fundamental narrative traditions in the history of Western art from painting and sculpture to photography and cinema -- will underline the connections between older narrative modes and modern cinema. Students will come to understand the traditional tools of pictorial narrative, to recognize these and newer visual codes as they appear in film, and to interpret the meanings of these codes as they are used in varying contexts. Beginning with a brief review of the invention and evolution of the medium up to the Second World War, we will define the vocabulary and refine the criteria by which the visual art of film is described and assessed. Finally we will examine, in roughly chronological order and in great detail, a selection of major cinematic narratives produced during the past 60 years, including films by Rossellini, Bresson, Hitchcock, directors of the French New Wave and those of Das Neue Kino in Germany, American Independents, and other important exponents of the latter-day Internationalist phenomenon.