Undervisningsplan

Course Schedule

1. American National Cinema, American Exceptionalism, and the “Certain Tendency” of “Classic Hollywood”

2. The Political Uses of American Tragedy: Crime Films and the Gangster Hero

3. Gangsters, Detectives and Hard Boiled Fiction: Crime Films and Film Noirs

4. “America” through the eye of the European auteur: Expressive Realism and Film Noir

5. Classic Film Noir: The femme fatale, metropolitan style and modern life

6. Post-War Documentary Realism and the New Encounter with American Space, the Highways and Cities of Film Noir

7. The Western of the 1950s and early 1960s: History Crowds American Space

8. Neo-Noir: the Left and Right Cycles of the 1970s

9. Environmentalism and Neo-Noir/ the Neo-Gangster Epic

10. Conclusion: Continuities and the Unfinished Business of American Cinema

Films to be seen in entirety (tentative list)

Stagecoach (1940)

Double Indemnity (1940)

Out of the Past (1948)

North by Northwest (1959)

Chinatown (1974)

A partial list of films discussed in this course:

Little Caesar

Scarface

High Sierra

Detour

Naked City

To Have and to Have Not

The Big Sleep

The Maltese Falcon

Treasure of Sierra Madre

The Grapes of Wrath

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Splendor in the Grass

The Birds

The Graduate

Easy Rider

Goodbye Columbus

Midnight Cowboy

Taxi Driver

Heat