Objectives
Without doubt, a nation's or region's cinema will be informed by such elements as its geography, history, spiritual beliefs, material culture, and perhaps most importantly, the other types of art that preceded it. Because film is a newer form of art due to the technological advances that had to be in place for it to exist, it necessarily will be informed by older art forms such as story-telling, poetry, painting, and theater. In America, most films, and certainly almost all popular films, follow a narrative structure similar to that of a novel or short story. That is why, as a teacher of literature, I am able to use movies that are familiar to all my students as examples when I teach such plot devices as rising action, climax, and resolution. Similarly, the characters in these films can usually be categorized in terms used to analyze characters found in the stories we read: multi-dimensional, one-dimensional, dynamic, static. Other categories we use to analyze fiction such as theme, point-of-view, setting, and mood also have their rough equivalents in Hollywood-style films. When it comes to viewing films from cultures far different from our own, the question is whether we can approach them the same way we approach popular American films. Certainly there is some overlap, but when we approach international films in exactly the same way we are used to approaching Hollywood films, we miss so much. I am guessing the reason I have had trouble getting students to buy into watching foreign films, subtitles and all, is that I have not adequately prepared them for the differences, not only in filmmaking techniques, but in the entire aesthetic context within which these films were made. With this in mind, the over-arching objective of this curriculum unit is to help students understand and appreciate international cinema by exposing them to the cultural and artistic traditions from which each region's cinema is arising. Does the cinema of other cultures extend a literary tradition different from that of the short story and novel that we are familiar with? We will ask this question as we watch foreign films. Along the way, students will be expected to learn about general filmmaking techniques and be able to identify them in the films they view. They will also be expected to compare and contrast both thematic and technical elements in films from different cultures. Most importantly, students will be able to demonstrate the relationship between the artistic heritage of each culture we study and that culture's contemporary cinema.
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