Movies You Saw in Film Class?

Cafe Society
1

College, high school, whatever. But an actual film class.

I’m interested in comparing (what else is new?) between all the different film schools. If you can give an approximation of the location without giving up your identity, that would be cool.

I remember the teacher very well. Old guy, white hair, still remember his face, but oddly, not his name, despite having a great memory. On Tuesday, we would watch the movie, and then as we left, he’d give us reading assignments, which I always avoided, but we’d have a discussion on Thursday. I kinda wish I could do it all over again since I wasn’t very experienced at 18. There are a few of those movies I wanted to re-watch, but they were pretty straight-forward.

-The Searchers
-Double Indemnity
-Taxi Driver
-Blade Runner (I actually fell asleep, and woke up at near the end)
-The Crying Game

We might have also seen “The Maltese Falcon”, but I’m not sure. I don’t remember any foreign movies, which is too bad. We also had a non-required “new” movie, “The Matrix”, which I had already seen, so I didn’t go. It was an ok movie. CGI does nothing for me; I was more interested in the psychological stuff.

I know there were more, but I just can’t think of them right now. Maybe someone here will name them.

2

Nosferatu
Un Chien Andalou
Grand Illusion
Double Indemnity
Sea of Love

I found I liked the noir films of the past - Double Indemnity is in my top 10 all time favorite films. Also found that while I love surrealist art (Dali, Magritte, De Chirico) I absolutely despise surrealist film.

3

The only actual class I sat in for was a retrospective of all of Ingmar Bergman’s films. This was around 1975. I had graduated, but I was free during class time and dropped by on campus to see them.

4

There are way too many for me to remember. I majored in Cinema Studies. Classes were generally 3-4 hours, so I’d be seeing several films each week. Some titles I can think of from various film courses I took included:

Introduction to Cinema Studies (Playtime, Birth of a Nation)
Film History: Silent Film (Sherlock, Jr. Nosferatu, Metropolis, Sunrise)
Film Theory (Rosemary’s Baby, Le Jetee, Poison, The American Astronaut)
American Film Violence (Bonnie & Clyde, Chinatown, Silence of the Lambs)
Film Noir (Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil, Blade Runner, Mildred Pierce)
Spaghetti Westerns & Italian Horror (The Good The Bad & the Ugly, Suspiria, The Cat O’ Nine Tails)
French Cinema (Le Ronde, Un Chien Andalou, Zero For Conduct)
Anime (Grave of the Fireflies, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Akira)
Film Aesthetics (Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, The Matrix)
Film Genres: Vampire Films (Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys)
Orson Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Trial, F For Fake, The Stranger, Citizen Kane)

and then I also had classes on:
American Film Since 1960
Advanced Seminar: Martin Scorsese
Alfred Hitchcock
Children’s Films

5

My junior year in high school we had a class called American Civ which was a team taught class combining history and literature. We watched movies for most of the periods in history we were watching. I remember two The Maltese Falcon (which I loved) and The Killing (which I found booooooring).

I took a film class in college and saw a bunch. Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (which was a silent and the instructor played the Missa Luba as the soundtrack…it actually worked). He even got Pauline Kael to come and speak to us. It was pretty cool.

6

My 2 film classes were History of the Fantasy Film (King Kong, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Phantom of the Paradise, etc.) and History of the Western Film (The Searchers, Ride the High Country, Shane, The Wild Bunch, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, etc.) Both were a lot of fun and kept me involved on campus when I was working my businesses.

7

Some of the more unusual titles I saw in various film classes are:
Dream of a Rarebit Field (1906)

Early and enjoyable trip flick - Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) - YouTube
Short films by Emile Cohl

All were awesome, but Les Joyeux Microbes (1909) has stayed with me all these years.

Short films by Len Lye

I remember The Birth of the Robot (1936) and N or NW1 (1938) fondly, but everything on the program was cool. One of the least appreciated filmmakers ever; I am grateful for my introduction to his work in whatever class that was.

MTV - Len Lye - The birth of a robot - YouTube - Extracts only

…And God Created Woman (1956)

I have forgotten what movie we were supposed to see, but in any event, it went AWOL so we got to see this instead. Given it was a class on French New Wave, I suspect we lucked out.
3:10 to Yuma (1957)

Decades before the inferior 2007 remake, this was an obscure Western nobody had ever heard of; the director, Delmer Daves is still obscure. Beautifully lit, it’s actually not all that good, and the climaxes of both versions remain senseless.
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

Two hours and twenty-one minutes that only seems like four hours. Jacques Rivette should have been prosecuted for crimes against cinema and wasting film stock.
Os Fuzis (1964)

Brazilian “Cinema Novo classic” is among the 50 worst films I have ever seen. Years ago, I successfully repressed it, so I don’t even remember why it was so bad.
Oh Dem Watermelons (1965)

Twelve minute short in which watermelons are exploited in every conceivable way possible, plus some inconceivable ways.
*
Wavelength* (1967)

Literal torture that should be banned, this is the worst movie I have ever seen. Forty-five minutes of slowly zooming-in on a painting while an annoying soundtrack din is gradually made louder and louder. One of only two movies that have ever made me nauseous (the other was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). I will never forgive the teacher that forced us to sit through this.
Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Another more celebrated Rivette piece of cinematic excrement, 3 hours long. Thank god we were spared Out 1 (1971) which runs over 12 hours.

8

Oh god I had successfully purged “Wavelength” from my memory until that post. I had to watch that piece of shit in my Film Theory class. That was excruciating.

9

Our son is in film school right now, but he’s concentrating on screenwriting. He has taken some film history,so I’ll try to remember and ask him tomorrow. He just got home after (finally) getting the stuff out of his dorm room.

10

Stage Door
Blow-Up
Something that wasn’t Berlin Alexanderplatz but has become confounded with it.
Something that played with filmic conventions (for example, cuts between people having a conversation, but both face the same way).
There were more, but I remember reading Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and some articles from Jump Cut more than I remember the films.

11

The Birds
Straw Dogs
The Phantom of Liberty
Gentlemen’s Agreement
My Son John

12

I love Grand Illusion. When I was taking that film class, I loved Kubrick and David Lynch, but I fell out of love with the surrealism real fast.

You probably saw it, but my favorite Billy Wilder is “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas. Still relevant today.

13

I took a film study class in high school. I only remember a short film version of Young Goodman Brown, Citizen Kane and The Omega Man.

14

I took a film class in my senior year of high school (1991). I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Grapes of Wrath
Working Girl
Rebel Without a Cause

I’m certain we would have seen a Western and a sci-fi but can’t remember what they were. I know the Sci-fi wasn’t Star Wars/Trek and wasn’t a classic like Metropolis.

15

Oh! Grapes of Wrath! We saw that in film class.

16

Just remembered that Wizard of Oz was on the list.
And, while typing that, remembered that the sci-fi Film we saw was Alien.

Still can’t recall the Western but I know he would have shown one.

17

I took an Intro to Film back in College in the 90s. I remember this distinctly. I sat in the chair on day one and thought to myself, “This will be easy. I’ll sit back, relax, watch a few movies and talk about them.”

The Professor comes in and puts down his briefcase and says, “If you think this class will be easy. That’ll you’ll just sit back, relax and watch a few movies and then just talk about them you’re wrong!”

As it turned out despite him apparently being able to read my thoughts, the class really did turn out to be interesting. I learned several things about scene composition. I don’t remember every movie we watched (we watched very few movies as class. basically they told us what movies we needed to watch. Some were available in the AV labs (the older ones) and others we had to acquire from rental stores etc. I don’t remember every movie but some of them were:

a bunch of Buster Keaton movies
Citizen Kane
Night Moves (a 70s movie with Gene Hackman)

There were others but I forget what they were.

18

Wow, you were lucky. We watched nothing this interesting. Most of the shit we watched was so boring I considered cutting off my own head. Try “Mon Oncle Antoine” sometime if you’re out of Ambien.

19

High school:
I don’t recall any other movies that we watched other than “The Horsemen” (Omar Sharif playing an Afghani horse tribesman). I only seem to recall a scene of them playing “polo” with a goat’s stomach.

I saw “Un Chien Andalou” in a Humanities class.

Jr. College Film Genres: Comedy Class:

  • The General
  • My Man Godfrey
  • The Producers
    There was also this french film about these interconnected love stories, but I don’t recall the title.
20

I went to something of a film school for college. I was there for special effects and animation, but I still took a couple film history classes. First a “regular” survey course and later a dedicated science fiction course, both by the same teacher.

(Probably in the wrong order, probably missing a few. The teacher would show clips from other movies before a full feature, so some of these might be misremembered.):
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
La Strada (1954, which remains the only movie I’ve walked out on)
Billy Liar (1963, British Kitchen Sink)
Onibaba (1964, Japan)
Ju Dou (1990, China)
The 400 Blows (1959, French New Wave)
Rear Window (1954)
Chinatown (1974)
Paths of Glory (1957)

Sci-Fi (The guy liked hard and mundane science fiction. This was around 2003 so we missed out on a lot of great stuff that came after):
Thomas In Love (2000, serious social distancing before it was cool)
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
The Thing From Another World (1951)
This Island Earth (1955)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Le Dernier Combat (1983)
The Fly (1986)

Other classes, from screenwriting to video editing, everybody showed movies at some point:
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959, with running commentary by my stroyboarding instructor on what not to do)
Matewan (1987, most depressing movie I’ve ever seen)
La Jetée (1962 short)
Pi (1998)