Introduction to Film Analysis: African American Cinema, 5 cr

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the basic concepts of film analysis including camera movements and perspectives, editing, light and sound, composition and mise-en-scène, as well as principles of filmic narration, with an emphasis on ways of reading and interpreting the language of cinema. Thematically, we will focus on the history of African American cinema. The course will cover a range of genres and contexts, from the ‘race films’ of the early twentieth century (including Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 melodrama Without Our Gates and the Black Western musical Harlem on the Prairie, Sam Newfield and Jed Buell, 1937) to 1970s Blaxploitation films (e.g. Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1970) and recent Afrofuturist cinema (such as the 2018 film Black Panther, dir. Ryan Coogler). We will discuss a different film every week. Each seminar session will be followed by a screening of the film for the following week.