American Film: Comedy

Grad section for FILM UN 2190 Topics in American Cinema.  Comedy or Film Noir 

Comedy:

This course will explore the history of American film comedy from the origins of cinema to the present. In its various forms, comedy has always been a staple of American film production; but it has also always been a site of heterogeneity and nonconformity in the development of American cinema, with neither its form nor its content fitting normative models of film practice. This course accounts for that nonconformity by exploring comedy’s close and essential links to “popular” cultural sources (in particular, vaudeville, variety, stand-up); it looks at how different comic filmmakers have responded to and reshaped those sources; and it examines the relation between comedy and social change. Rather than engage the entire spectrum of comic styles (animation, mockumentary, etc.), this course is primarily focused on a single tradition bridging the silent and sound eras: the performance-centered, “comedian comedy” format associated with performers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and, into the present Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell, and others. “Laughter and its forms,” writes theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, “represent the least scrutinized sphere of the people's creation.” This course will restore film comedy to the scrutiny it deserves, examining both its inward formal development and its external relation to other modes of cultural expression.

Film Noir:

This course surveys the American film genre known as film noir, focusing primarily on the genre’s heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s, taking into account some of its antecedents in the hard-boiled detective novel, German Expressionism, and the gangster film, among other sources. We will consider a number of critical and theoretical approaches to the genre, and will also study a number of film noir adaptations and their literary sources.