What a difficult and daunting task it must be to come up with a movie playlist for an introductory art class in film concepts and techniques.The movies chosen for this semesters viewing attempted to cover several genres while introducing students to terminology and the language of movie making . The textbook "Looking At The Movies" and the tutorial dvd did a very good job of giving the students a basic understanding to the difficult and complex job of making movies.One thing I will take from this class is the concept of reading a movie as opposed to just watching a movie for entertainment purposes.
The three movies from this semesters list that stood out for me or were my favorites were Out of The Past ,North by Northwest, and The Godfather.Memento should be on this list as well but since I devoted a great deal of time to this wonderful neo-noir movie in my term paper I have chosen to omit it from my top three list.
Out of the Past was a very good choice to introduce the film noir genre to the class and to give us a bit of history of the evolution of movies .In order to understand where we are now in the evolutionary process of making movies and where we are headed we must understand where we came from.
No film class introductory or otherwise should be taught without including one of the top directors in the history of movie making namely Sir Alfred Hitchcock.You could probably spend an entire semester just studying this master of his craft and his large body of work.The inclusion of North by Northwest was a wonderful way to introduce the concept of setting,framing,and camera angles such as the high angle from overhead along with the editing and lets not forget about the concept of sound when talking about this wonderful movie.Thinking back to when I was reading the textbook this movie was referenced multiple times when concepts and techniques were being discussed.
The Godfather directed by Francis Ford Coppola is simply one of the top 10 or 15 movies ever made in my humble opinion and can be studied for its wonderful acting ,lighting, and editing .The book by the way was even better than the movie.
If i were to make a change or an addition to the list of movies viewed in this class I would include Citizen Kane as I believe all students of film should know who Oscar Wilde is and should be familiar with someone who I consider to be one of the most important individuals in movie making.
