CTVA 310: History of American Cinema

This is a collection of scholarly essays that focuses on particular phases of Chaplin's career through various critical lenses, in order to highlight the understated, and often overlooked, complexity of Chaplin's filmmaking, and to provide insight into both the extensive range and the limits of the critical leverage of a broad array of interpretive theories.

With its sharp focus on stardom during the 1920's, Idols of Modernity reveals strong connections and dissonances in matters of storytelling and performance that can be traced both backward and forward, across Europe, Asia, and the United States, from the silent era into the emergence of sound.

This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema-both movies and movie-going-in the early 1910's. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States.

The romantic comedy has long been regarded as an inferior film genre by critics and scholars alike, accused of maintaining a strict narrative formula which is considered superficial and highly predictable. However, the genre has resisted the negative scholarly and critical comments and for the last three decades the steady increase in the numbers of romantic comedies position the genre among the most popular ones in the globally dominant Hollywood film industry.

This collection of essays looks at how films in the last few years have reflected and juxtaposed the ascent of Barack Obama and his administration. The films examined here include The Help, Django Unchained, Lincoln, The Mist, Invictus, Black Dynamite, and The Great Gatsby.