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Special Topics in Film Genre – Silent Film Comedy
171 001 | CCN: 24502
Location: Dwinelle 142
Date and Time: TU, TH 9:30am - 10:59am
4 Units
This course introduces students to silent film comedy from the 1890s to 1930s. Beginning with early Lumière and Porter short films in which film scholars have located the origins of both film comedy and film narrative, we will move through actualities, trick films, and the transitional narratives of the first decade of the 20th century. Thereafter, we will examine the work of the directors and actors who form the canon of American silent comedy: Griffith and Sennett, Lloyd and Langdon, Keaton and Chaplin. Course texts will focus not only on the formal and narrative style of these films, but their contribution to contemporary discourses of race, gender, and labor. We will complicate and enrich this history by examining the recent work of feminist scholars of silent cinema, whose attention to gender, sexuality, and racial formation provides rigorous, useful, and provocative correctives to canonical accounts. These scholars will extend our understanding of film comedy to figures like Edna Foster, Mabel Normand, Leatrice Joy, and Clara Bow.