This course treats the emergence of film from the larger nineteenth-century visual culture in Paris. To move through the city was to consume visual culture at every turn: one saw posters on hoardings and Morris columns, products and advertisements in shop windows, and new architectural structures rising from the ground. Students will dive deeply into learning about the range of new urban experiences wrought by nineteenth-century modernization, the performance culture in such contexts as Opera, theater and World’s Fairs, as well as the new ways of viewing they conditioned. These changes laid the ground-work for the emergence of cinema, whose history from 1895 to 1907 is also the subject of this course.
The course also has an important second goal. The content is also the subject of two major museum exhibitions (Musée d’Orsay, Paris and LACMA) that the professor co-curated. Students will learn about the process of creating a museum exhibition from start to finish by studying at the museums and by meeting the teams of museum professionals engaged in the exhibition process.
The class begins in Los Angeles, where the exhibition, “City of Cinema” will be on display at LACMA. We will meet at the exhibition four days a week for the first two weeks, convening with LACMA curators, Britt Salvesen and Leah Lehmbeck three times. The class then moves to Paris for a week-long study visit that will include meetings at the Musée d’Orsay with curators there, to the Cinémathèque, visiting its permanent display, its Director and seeing its library, and additional site visits in and around the city, including visits to the Opéra, Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. There will be optional evening activities to attend the Opéra, other exhibitions and several group lunches and dinners in Paris
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
Analysis: Increase the student’s ability to analyze creative endeavors, including describing them with appropriate vocabulary, examining their formal elements, and engaging in research to understand their contexts.
Context: Enrich the student’s discernment of creative production (in visual culture) in the past by increasing knowledge of its historical and aesthetic bases. Special emphasis is on urban history and media history and the connection between the two.
Connections: Deepen the student’s appreciation of the connections between creative endeavors and concurrent political, religious, and social conditions; show how these endeavors fulfill cultural functions or fill cultural needs. Class readings and meetings with museum professionals are means to this end.
Professional and Future Engagement: Increase the student’s understanding of what it means to pursue a career in the museum-world or to become a lifelong supporter and/or participant in both film and museum culture; to gain understanding about the connections between scholarship and public knowledge.