Atlanta Film Festival 365

• The formal concerns of each film
• How the drama unfolds? Do literary devices function the same way in film?
• How successfully is the story told
• How well are the characters developed
• The mood of the film?
• The look and style of the film
• The experience for the viewer
• And perhaps mostly essential to the discussion, an exploration of the following excerpt “Why our longings so often end in acts of self-sabotage?” – Adam Phillips.

Week 1: Bad Boys


Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Arthur Penn
Breathless (1960) Jean Luc Goddard
Scott, A.O., “Two Outlaws Blasting Holes in the Screens,” The New York Times,
August 12, 2007.

In this class, we’ll discuss:
What was ground-breaking about these films in terms of cinema.
What was the French “Nouvelle Vague.”
Are these pictures love stories?
How are ideas of masculinity explored in each film?
How well are the characters developed?

Week 2: Ego and the Love of Women

8 ½ (1963) Federico Fellini
Stardust Memories (1980) Woody Allen
James, Clive, “Mondo Fellini,” The New Yorker, March 21, 1994.

In this class, we’ll discuss:

Auteurship, ego, farce and the sub-conscious!!
What Fellini is saying about love…
Film as Homage..
Art direction in each film

Week 3: Marriage and Treachery

Mississippi Mermaid (1969) Francois Truffaut
La moustache (2005) Emmanuel Carrere
Holden, Stephen, “”La Moustache’: A French Mystery Plays with Notions of Conspiracy and Illusion,” The New York Times, May 24, 2006.

Week 4: Pacing and Pathos

Claire’s Knee (1970) Eric Rohmer
Forty Shades of Blue (2005) Ira Sachs
Haskell, Molly. “Claire’s Knee: Rohmer’s Women,” Criterion Collection Online.
http://www. Criterion.com/current/posts/438

In this class we’ll discuss:

The exploration of character in each film…
Are there elements of exploitation in each film?
How does the pace of each film change our experience of it?

Week 5: Surrealism Then and Now

Belle de jour (1967) Luis Bunuel
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Stanley Kubrick
Lane, Anthony, “Profiles: Luis Bunuel” excerpted from Nobody’s Perfect, First Vintage Books Edition, September 2003. Copyright 2002 by Anthony Lane.

In this class, we’ll discuss:

Surrealism and dream sequences in each film: Is it intended to be clear what is real and what is not?
The exploration of the sub-conscious in each film
What’s visually compelling about each film?

Week 6. What is Michael Haneke Trying to Achieve in these films?

The Piano Teacher (2001) Michael Haneke
The Seventh Continent (1989) Haneke
Wray, John, “The Minister of Fear,” The New York Times, September 23, 2007.

In this class, we’ll discuss:

Director Michael Haneke and the curious goals of these films…
Are Haneke’s characters “adrift in a profoundly dysfunctional world?”
Whether Michael Haneke is making a sociological or psychological assessment of humanity these films.
What is the role of the viewer/audience…As a witness? As a voyeur?

Week 7: Marriage and Pathology

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols)
Faithless (2000) Liv Ullman
Merkin, Daphne, “The Literary Freud,” The New York Times, July 13, 2003.

In this class we’ll discuss at length the assigned reading material with special emphasis
on the phrase: “the infinite human capacity for mangling desire….”
Unbelievable performances of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton…..
Are the films painful to watch? Is that discouraging?
The special contributions of both Edward Albee and Ingmar Bergman in each film respectively.

Week 8: Wish Fulfillment

 Solaris (1972) Andrei Tarkovsky
Birth (2004) Jonathan Glazer

In this class, we’ll discuss:

Freud and his ideas about wish fulfillment
How is the same idea explored in two very different films?
Again….What do we come to understand about human nature in each film?
Is Solaris mostly a science fiction ….or something else..
Special screening of my own film, “wishes” – inspired in part by both films (16 min).