Tom Whalen

 

 

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SS 2007

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LK Wintersemester 2007/08 Universität Stuttgart
Zeit und Ort: Freitags 14.00 - 17.00 Location: H7, room M7.005 (and M7.210 for three sessions - see below)

 


Orson Welles, The Stranger 

GERMANY THROUGH THE CINEMATIC EYE


The course will examine films by such directors as Borzage, Lubitsch, Lang, Hitchcock, Welles, Reed, Peckinpah, and the Brothers Quay that reflect on Germany primarily during the era of National Socialism. Careful attention will be given to the relationship between a film's cinematic elements and its themes.

October 19
Introduction

October 26
The Three Comrades Frank Borzage (1938) 98

November 2
The Mortal Storm Frank Borzage (1940) 100
      "The Mortal Storm" John Belton (essay)

November 9
To Be or Not To Be Ernst Lubitsch (1942) 99

November 16
Hangmen Also Die! – Fritz Lang (1943) 131’

November 23
Ministry of Fear – Fritz Lang (1944) 87’

November 30
Lifeboat Alfred Hitchcock (1944) 96

December 7
Notorious Alfred Hitchcock (1946) 101
      
"Notorious:
Perversion par Excellence" Richard Abel (essay)

December 14
The Stranger Orson Welles (1946) 95

January 11 (Room M.7.210)
The Third Man Carol Reed (1949) 104

January 18
Castle Keep Sydney Pollack (1969) 103

January 25 (Room M.7.210)
Cross of Iron Sam Peckinpah (1977) 132

February 1
The Trial Orson Welles (1962) 119
      "The Study of Persecution: The Trial" Peter Cowie (essay)

February 8 (Room M.7.210)
Street of Crocodiles
Brothers Quay (1986) 21
      "The Street of Crocodiles" Bruno Schulz (tr. Celina Wieniewska; story)
___________ Students pick up Scheine

ATTENTION: Due to the nature of this course, classes may last up to three hours.

Course requirements: regular attendance (no more than three absences allowed).
Grades will be based on short reading and viewing quizzes and class participation.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Little Man, What Now? – Frank Borzage (1934) 91’
The 39 Steps – Alfred Hitchcock (1935) 87’
Sabotage – Alfred Hitchcock (1936) 76’
Things to Come – William Cameron Menzies (1936) 92’
Beasts of Berlin – Sam Newfield (1939) 87’
Confessions of a Nazi Spy – Anatole Litvak (1939) 102’
The Spy in Black – Michael Powell (1939) 82’
The Great Dictator Charles Chaplin (1940) 128
Escape to Glory
– John Brahm (1940) 74’
Foreign Correspondent – Alfred Hitchcock (1940) 119’
The Man I Married (aka I Married a Nazi) – Irving Pichel (1940) 77’
You Nazty Spy! – Jules White (1940) 18’ (The Three Stooges)
I’ll Never Heil Again – Jules White (1941) 18’ (The Three Stooges)
49th Parallel – Michael Powell (1941) 117’
Man Hunt – Fritz Lang (1941) 105’
One of Our Aircraft is Missing – Michael Powell (1941) 98’
Underground
- Vincent Sherman (1941) 95’

Casablanca – Michael Curtiz (1942) 102’
Contraband – Michael Powell (1942) 92’
Der Fuehrer's Face – Jack Kinney (1942) 8' (Walt Disney cartoon)
Journey Into Fear – Norman Foster (1942) 69’
Nazi Agent – Jules Dassin (1942) 83’
Once Upon a Honeymoon – Leo McCarey (1942) 117’
Saboteur – Alfred Hitchcock (1942) 100’
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – Roy William Neill (1942) 68’
The Devil with Hitler – Gordon Douglas (1942) 44’ (Roach Studios comedy short)
Natzy Nuisance – Glenn Tryon (1943) 43’ (Roach Studios comedy short)
Five Graves to Cairo – Billy Wilder (1943) 97’
Hitler’s Madmen – Douglas Sirk (1943) 84’
The North Star – Lewis Milestone (1943) 105’
Sahara Zoltan Korda (1943) 97’
Tarzan Triumphs – William Thiele (1943) 78’
Tarzan's Desert Mystery – William Thiele (1943) 70’
They Came to Blow Up America – Edward Ludwig (1943) 73’
This Land is Mine – Jean Renoir (1943) 103’
Watch on the Rhine – Herman Shumlin (1943) 114’
The Hitler Gang – John Farrow (1944) 101’
The Master Race
– Herbert J. Biberman (1944) 96’
Till We Meet Again – Frank Borzage (1944) 88’
Cornered – Edward Dmytryk (1945) 102’
Hotel Berlin – Peter Godfrey (1945) 98’
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1945) 136’
The Captive Heart – Basil Dearden (1946) 108’
Cloak and Dagger – Fritz Lang (1946) 106’
The Third Man – Carol Reed (1946) 95’
Frieda – Basil Dearden (1947) 97’
Foreign Affair – Billy Wilder (1948) 116’
The Search – Fred Zinnemann (1948) 105’
Mystery Submarine – Douglas Sirk (1950) 78’
The Wooden Horse
– Jack Lee (1950) 101’
The Desert Fox – Henry Hathaway (1951) 88’
Decision Before Dawn – Anatole Litvak (1952) 119’
5 Fingers – Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1952) 108’
The Desert Rats – Robert Wise (1953) 88’
The Man Between – Carol Reed (1953) 101’
Stalag 17
– Billy Wilder (1953) 120’

The Dam Busters – Michael Anderson (1954) 119’
The Colditz Story – Guy Hamilton (1957) 97’
The Enemy Below – Dick Powell (1957) 98’
The Last Blitzkrieg – Arthur Dreifuss (1958) 84’
The One That Got Away – Roy Ward Baker (1958) 106’
The Young Lions – Edward Dmytryk (1958) 167’
Ten Seconds to Hell – Robert Aldrich (1959) 93’
Verboten – Samuel Fuller (1959) 93’
Ice Cold in Alex – J. Lee Thompson (1960) 132’
Sink the Bismarck! – Lewis Gilbert (1960) 97’
One, Two, Three – Billy Wilder (1961) 108’
Operation Eichmann – R. G. Springsteen (1961) 93’
Judgment at Nuremberg – Stanley Kramer (1961) 178’
The Longest Day – Ken Annakin, Andrew Marten, Bernhard Wicki (1962) 180’
The Great Escape – John Sturges (1963) 168’
The Train – John Frankenheimer (1964) 133’
Morituri – Bernhard Wicki (1965) 123’
Operation Crossbow – Michael Anderson (1965) 116’
The Pawnbroker – Sidney Lumet (1965) 116’
The Sound of Music – Robert Wise (1965) 174’
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – Martin Ritt (1965) 112’
Von Ryan's Express – Mark Robson (1965) 117’
The Blue Max – John Guillermin (1966) 156’
Funeral in Berlin – Guy Hamilton (1966) 102’
Torn Curtain – Alfred Hitchcock (1966) 128’
The Producers – Mel Brooks (1968) 88’
Where Eagles Dare – Brian G. Hutton (1968) 158’
The McKensie Break – Lamont Johnson (1970) 106’
Which Way to the Front? – Jerry Lewis (1970) 96'
Cabaret – Bob Fosse (1972) 124’
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street – Samuel Fuller (1972) 102
Slaughterhouse-Five – George Roy Hill (1972) 104’
The Odessa File – Ronald Neame (1974) 128’
The Eagle Has Landed – John Sturges (1976) 134’
Voyage of the Damned – Stuart Rosenberg (1976) 134’
The Boys from Brazil – Franklin J. Schaffner (1978) 123’
Bad Timing – Nicolas Roeg (1980) 129’
The Big Red One – Samuel Fuller (1980) 156’
Eye of the Needle – Richard Marquand (1981) 112’
The Lightship – Jerzy Skolimowski (1985) 89’
Triumph of the Spirit – Robert M. Young (1989) 121’
Kafka – Steven Soderberg (1991) 98’
A Midnight Clear – Keith Gordon (1992) 107’
Schindler’s List – Steven Spielberg (1993) 195’
Wittgenstein – Derek Jarman (1993) 75’
Institute Benjamenta – The Brothers Quay (1996) 104’
Mother Night – Keith Gordon (1996) 110’
Jakob the  Liar – Peter Kassovitz (1999) 114’
The Grey Zone – Tim Blake Nelson (2002)108’
Hart’s War – Gregory Hobit (2002) 125’
The Pianist – Roman Polanski (2002) 148’
Munich – Steven Spielberg (2005) 164’
Sweet Land – Ali Selim (2005) 110'
The Good German – Steven Soderbergh (2006) 105’
Pierrepoint—The Last Hangman – Adrian Shergold (2007) 90’

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. General

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1985.
Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw Hill, 2005.
Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies.  Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2006.
Monaco, James. How To Read a Film. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1981.
Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Da Capo, 1993.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: Dutton, 1968.
——. “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film—History and Memory, 1927 – 1949. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998.

II. Comedy

Karnick, Kristine Brunovsak and Henry Jenkins, eds. Classical Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Mast, Gerald.  The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.
Sikov, Ed. Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1994.

III. Germany, Hollywood and the War

Dick, Bernard F. The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film. Lexington: U. Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Doherty, Thomas.  Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1999.
Fuchs, Anne; Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote eds. German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse Since 1990. Rochester, NY:  Camden House, 2006.
Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003.  Koppes, Clayton R. and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism, Movies and the Second World War, from “Ninotchka” to “Mrs. Miniver”. New York: The Free Press, 1987.
Loshitzky, Yosefa. Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on "Schindler's List". Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1997.
McLaughlin, Robert L. and Sally E. Parry. We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II. Lexington, KY: U. Press of Kentucky, 2006.
O'Brien, Mary-Elizabeth. Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003.
Reimer, Robert C. Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on Cinema of Nazi Germany. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.
Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1994.

IV. Directors

      (Borzage)
Belton, John. The Hollywood Professionals: Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1974.
Dumont, Hervé.  Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic. tr. Jonathan Kaplansky. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Lamster, Frederick. “Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity”: The Film Work of Frank Borzage. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

      (Chaplin)
Robinson, David. Charlie Chaplin: The Art of Comedy. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
Schickel, Richard. The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.

      (Fuller)
Garnham, Nicholas. Samuel Fuller. New York: Viking, 1971.
Hardy, Phil. Samuel Fuller. New York: Praeger, 1970.

      (Hitchcock)
Deutelbaum, Marshall and Leland Poague (eds.).  A Hitchcock Reader. Ames: Iowa State U. Press, 1986.
Durgnat, Raymond. The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
Freedman, Jonathan and Richard Millington (eds.). Hitchcock's America. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1999.
La Valley, Albert J. (ed.). Focus on Hitchcock. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.
Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1982.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia U. Press, 2002.
Yacowar, Maurice. Hitchcock’s British Films. Camden, CT: Archon, 1977.

      (Lang)
Armour, Robert A. Fritz Lang. Boston: Twayne: 1977.
Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo, 1976.
Gunning, Tom.  The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI, 2000.
Jensen, Paul M. The Cinema of Fritz Lang. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969.
Humphries, Reynold.  Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1989.

      (Lubitsch)
Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not to Be. London: The British Film Institute, 2002.
Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000.
Paul, William. Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1987.
Poague, Leland A. The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch.  New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978.

      (Peckinpah)
Simmons, Garner. Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage. Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1976.
Weddle, David. “If They Move . . . Kill ‘Em!”: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Grove Press, 1994.

      (Reed)
Evans, Peter William. Carol Reed. Manchester: Manchester U. Press, 2005.
Moss, Robert F. The Films of Carol Reed. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1987.
White, Rob. The Third Man. London: The British Film Institute, 2003.

      (Welles)
Bazin, André. Orson Welles: A Critical View. Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991.
Garis, Robert. The Films of Orson Welles. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2004.
Gottesman, Ronald (ed.). Focus on Orson Welles. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas: SMU Press, 1989.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2007.

      (Wilder)
Dick, Bernard F. Billy Wilder. New York: DaCapo, 1996.
Henry, Nora. Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.