# Movies You Saw in Film Class? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 14, 2020, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671 "2020-06-14T22:09:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/21 "2020-06-15T18:31:24Z")
I had a really excellent class in Avant-Garde Cinema the fall term of my freshman college year, 1978. I wish I still owned the syllabus, but I can remember these films offhand… **Symphonie Diagonale;** Viking Eggeling **Ballet Mechanique;** Fernand Leger **Anemic Cinema;** Marcel Duchamp **Menilmontant;** Dimitri Kirsanoff **Rhythmus 21;** Hans Richter **Emak-Bakia; L’Etoile de Mer;** Man Ray **Entr’Acte;** Rene Clair **La Coquille et la Clergymman;** Germain Dulac **La Chute de la Maison Usher;** Jean Epstein **Un Chien Andalou;** Salvador Dali & Luis Buñuel Then we jumped postwar to America. **Meshes of the Afternoon;** Maya Deren **Fireworks; The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; Scorpio Rising;** Kenneth Anger **Sirius Rising;** Stan Brakhage **My Hustler;** Andy Warhol **A Movie;** Bruce Conner **Castro Street;** Bruce Baillie **Wavelength;** Michael Snow I LIKE surrealist movies! ---
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/22 "2020-06-15T18:36:23Z")
The European films are all from the 1920s; the American ones between the 40s and the 60s. The prof (Donald Crafton) also recommended we take in David Lynch’s **Eraserhead,** which was brand-new in 1978 and playing at one of the regular campus film societies. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/23 "2020-06-15T18:40:00Z")
I took a course at Binghamton University (SUNY-Binghamton back then, 1980) called Propaganda in Cinema. The movies were: 1)Triumph of the Will -(Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda piece) 2) The Black Legion (Humphrey Bogart movie depicting a KKK knockoff) 3) Alexander Nevsky ( Sergei Eisenstein’s classic about Russian hero of the 13th century who fought the Teutonic Knights (the Germans!)) and a Max Fleischer cartoon of “Superman vs The Japanese” in WWII. Quite a lineup. I took the class expecting it to be a piece of cake to earn some summer credits. But I worked my butt off in my critiques/analyses. Loved every minute of it. ---
**Author:** ![snoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@snoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snoe)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/24 "2020-06-15T19:23:06Z")
My senior year of high school (1993, Southern California public school) I took the film class. The teacher liked to focus on the works of a single director each semester, and I got stuck with Joel Schumacher. (The kids the semester before got Spike Lee, I think.) I mean, you can still learn about shots and editing and diagetic/extradiagetic sound from watching dreck like _Dying Young,_ but it’s not so fun. My freshman year of college (East Coast, private) I took a year-long intro film course from an Italian Marxist professor. Great variety of stuff, and I loved that she was very out front with her political-philosophical approach while also covering all the material you expect in an intro course. Memorable stuff we saw: _Meshes of the Afternoon Battle of Algiers Blow Job_ (Warhol) _Mississippi Masala The Searchers_ Godard and Gorin’s _Tout Va Bien_ and its very weird companion, _Letter to Jane_ (a video “letter” to Jane Fonda analyzing and critiquing a photo of her from her infamous trip to Vietnam — two French Maoists yapping at Fonda about how she’s a bad ally, it’s absolutely hilarious) EDIT: _Battleship Potemkin!_ How could I forget And later in college I took a seminar on independent film, specifically that 90s incarnation of it we all know and love (Miramax being the exemplar). Everybody had to organize a screening of one film and do a mini-lecture on its production; I picked _Miller’s Crossing_. I know somebody else did _Slacker_, which is such a great movie. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/25 "2020-06-15T20:51:03Z")
I took a film class in college but I don’t remember all the movies we saw. The ones that I do remember were: _Stagecoach_ _Alexander Nevsky_ _Triumph Of The Will_ _The Stranger_ The first 3 movies were presented as propaganda of the era. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/26 "2020-06-15T22:11:51Z")
> [@Quimby](#): > > 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. LOL! On a similar note, my sister had to take Intro to Human Sexuality for her major (psychology and social work; nursing and PT/OT students had to take it as well, and it was recommended for other HCP students) and on the first day of class, the prof came in and said, “If you signed up for this class because you wanted to get credit for watching porno movies, you are wasting your time and mine” and the next day, the class was a lot smaller. This was in the early 1990s. As for “Celine and Julie Go Boating”, a film club I was in in the late 1990s screened that, and until the club folded a decade later, that was consistently in the suggestion box, for films NOT to show. I didn’t see it, and am glad I didn’t, based on what other people said as well. IDK who in the club suggested it, or why. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2020, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/27 "2020-06-15T22:58:15Z")
I don’t know if this counts as a “class”, but I was in film club (whose membership coincided exactly with AP English) in high school. The only specific films I remember seeing in it were _Casablanca_ and _Plan 9 from Outer Space_, in sequential weeks, because the teacher/moderator wanted us to see just how much variation in quality was possible in film. ---
**Author:** ![MortSahlFan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/28 "2020-06-16T13:07:24Z")
> [@garygnu](#): > > 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) Lots of good movies… “La Strada” is actually my 2nd favorite movie ever. I’m not a fan of newer movies (last 40 years), but I did like “Matewan” and generally like movies with labor strikes and solidarity in general. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/29 "2020-06-16T13:20:23Z")
I sat through _Battleship Potemkin_ twice in one semester. Once for a film appreciation class and again for a Soviet History course. ---
**Author:** ![Intergalactic\_Gladiator](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/intergalactic_gladiator/32/112_2.png) [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Intergalactic_Gladiator)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/30 "2020-06-16T14:51:20Z")
I took two film classes in college, the second one was war films (I would have loved to have taken science fiction, but I couldn’t get my schedule to fit). I remember some but not all of the films that we saw: Malcom X Citizen Kane - paused a lot during viewing to talk about it, did not see whole film in class Psycho - paused a lot during viewing Reservoir Dogs All Quiet on the Western Front Paths of Glory Hell’s Angels Battle of the Bulge (I think…) 34 Charlie Mopic Full Metal Jacket I also watched Force 10 From Navarone on my own to write a report about it but it wasn’t shown in class. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/31 "2020-06-16T15:01:47Z")
Here’s a recent data point: a friend’s kid took a film class recently. High school, with a great teacher who could get them to talk afterwards. Pretty much the classics: Citizen Kane The Seventh Seal Seven Samurai On the Waterfront North by Northwest The Birds The Deer Hunter …and Ferris Bueller! ---
**Author:** ![gonzoron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a6a055/32.png) [@gonzoron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzoron)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/32 "2020-06-16T18:32:29Z")
Took two semesters of Cinema as my senior year humanities electives at Cooper Union. The professor was a film reviewer for the Village Voice. It was a pretty chronological sweep from Muybridge’s horse and _The Great Train Robbery_ up to approximately _Star Wars_. Classes were in the evenings. There would be one night of watching 1-4 films, depending on length, and then one night of discussions. I loved it, even when the films were torture. other films I remember: _Birth of a Nation The Bicycle Thief Modern Times Citizen Kane Nosferatu Un Chien Andalou Metropolis M Wavelength_ (yes, it’s torture. and yet, I loved it.) _Jeanne Dielman_ (another one everyone in class despised, but I liked. _Last Year at Marienbad Das Boot Rope Battleship Potemkin_ I know there were a bunch more that I’m forgetting. Ironically, though I had taken the class in part for the thrill of watching Star Wars for credit, I ended up skipping it, since I had other end-of-year work and finals to cram for that night and had seen it dozens of times already. ---
**Author:** ![FastDan1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fastdan1/32/427_2.png) [@FastDan1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FastDan1)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/33 "2020-06-16T19:15:39Z")
I saw _Battleship Potemkin_ for a High School class. It has come in handy for trivia a couple of times. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/34 "2020-06-16T21:01:33Z")
> [@garygnu](#): > > 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) RE: the bolded. I loved _La Strada_. Completely heartbreaking. The only movie I’ve ever walked out of was _Rollerball_. So boooooooooring. ---
**Author:** ![shstrang98](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/50afbb/32.png) [@shstrang98](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shstrang98)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2020, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/35 "2020-06-16T21:08:06Z")
clockwork orange- disgusting Alien -excellent sci-fi. ---
**Author:** ![MortSahlFan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2020, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/36 "2020-06-17T12:52:04Z")
> [@carrps](#): > > RE: the bolded. I loved _La Strada_. Completely heartbreaking. The only movie I’ve ever walked out of was _Rollerball_. So boooooooooring. Ha… I tried watching “Rollerball” last week (second attempt) and had to turn it off. ---
**Author:** ![LegendHasit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/legendhasit/32/8246_2.png) [@LegendHasit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LegendHasit)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2020, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/37 "2020-06-17T23:16:35Z")
Some I remember from high school film class '90: The Graduate Psycho Manchurian Candidate There had to be more, but all I can remember is the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack from The Graduate and creepy Norman Bates (and a great introduction to Hitchcock). ---
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2020, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/38 "2020-06-18T02:32:49Z")
_Everybody_ should watch a “bunch of Buster Keaton movies.” The guy was a genius, and should be appreciated forever. Here’s a slice of a talkie with Buster and (cough) Ukulele Ike. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/cu3p6PBix64/hqdefault.jpg "Buster Keaton Ukulele") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu3p6PBix64) ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2020, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/39 "2020-06-18T02:37:45Z")
> [@gonzoron](#): > > Took two semesters of Cinema as my senior year humanities electives at Cooper Union. The professor was a film reviewer for the Village Voice. It was a pretty chronological sweep from Muybridge’s horse and _The Great Train Robbery_ up to approximately _Star Wars_. Classes were in the evenings. There would be one night of watching 1-4 films, depending on length, and then one night of discussions. I loved it, even when the films were torture. > > other films I remember: > _Birth of a Nation > The Bicycle Thief > Modern Times > Citizen Kane > Nosferatu > Un Chien Andalou > Metropolis > M > Wavelength_ (yes, it’s torture. and yet, I loved it.) > _Jeanne Dielman_ (another one everyone in class despised, but I liked. > _Last Year at Marienbad > Das Boot > Rope > Battleship Potemkin_ > > I know there were a bunch more that I’m forgetting. Ironically, though I had taken the class in part for the thrill of watching Star Wars for credit, I ended up skipping it, since I had other end-of-year work and finals to cram for that night and had seen it dozens of times already. We watched The Birth of a Nation in high school in Orange County, Ca. I have mixed feelings about that. We were too young to balance its artistic merit opposed to its racist nature. ---
**Author:** ![Blisters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Blisters](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blisters)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2020, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671/40 "2020-06-23T04:06:56Z")
The only one I remember watching was Surfwise. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-you-saw-in-film-class/855671.md?page=3)