(To the right, a German poster for the 1924 film The Last Laugh, one of the films we'll study this semester)
Welcome, Honors 399/Film & Social Problems Students:
This is a course that probes that role feature films
have played in exploring as well as bringing light to social problems and
issues, whether in the stories of individuals or groups caught the mesh of
those issues or through dramatic events those issues helped create. Film will
be discussed against the backdrop of how other art forms—painting, music,
literature—have addressed these issues.
. The so-called “Hollywood Social Problem” film has
been defined as one that “combines social analysis and dramatic conflict within
a coherent narrative structure (distinguished by) its didacticism.” (Roffman
and Purdy)
This course will include such films but also reach
beyond to examples from German Expressionist film, Film Noir, and independent film where no
edifying solution may be offered but rather the depiction of an underlying
truth or hard-boiled reality.
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