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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
