Inspired by Catherine Grant sharing Mark Cousin's idea of a 50 week film school curriculum, here's my own version of that idea.
Week 1
Hand students a digital camera and tell them to go film something honest. Can be anything so long as I believe it. Film it in days 1 and 2, edit them the rest of the week.
Week 2
Watch documentary films by Robert Flaherty, Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, and Robert Greene, examine dramatic truth, cinematic non-fiction.
Week 3
Keaton, Chaplin, Murnau and truth without words
Week 4
Show all of John Cassavetes' movies as director, and the Dick Cavett interview with Falk, Gazzara and Cassavetes. Film is a series of accidents.
Week 5
John Carpenter, Ingmar Bergman, and how to fill a frame.
Week 6
Montage, from Eisenstein to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
Week 7
See any and all repertory cinema available in the outside world. Must be on celluloid. Students must take notes on impressions of watching film in every case.
Week 8
Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets, Art History, Kissing on the Mouth, and Aaron Katz' Quiet City, and Cold Weather - focus as a way around budgetary restrictions.
Week 9
Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, James Benning and how to communicate with the natural world.
Week 10
Cameras handed out again. Short films (20+ minutes) must incorporate environment and written dialogue.
Week 11
Edit resulting films. Show them to cadre of critics for reactions.
Week 12
Powell & Pressburger and how to build a world across several films.
Week 13
Terence Malick and what a script can't tell you
Week 14
Bill Morrison and how to interact with images.
Week 15
First week on how to film comedy, Preston Sturges vs. Jerry Lewis
Week 16
Second week on how to film comedy, Frank Tashlin, Billy Wilder & Jacques Tati.
Week 17
Third week on how to film comedy, Laurel & Hardy.
Week 18
Fourth week on how to film comedy, screwball comedy.
Week 19
Exploitation: from Dwain Esper/Kroger Babb through to Michael Findlay
Week 20
Exploitation from Russ Meyer to Shauna Grant
Week 21
Third World Cinema: marxism and equal distribution of the tools of filmmaking.
Week 22
Romantic Comedy, and how to draw characters worth caring about.
Week 23
French New Wave & Giallo, radicalism evolving in two different directions, all from Roberto Rossellini
Week 24
Filmed plays and how to handle theatricality
Week 25
Film scoring, Miklós Rózsa through to Jonny Greenwood, but really we're talking about Michael Nyman here.
Week 26
Italo-modernism: L'Avventura, La Dolce Vita, The Grim Reaper, Fists In The Pocket, Before The Revolution, 8 1/2, L'Eclisse, Red Desert
Week 27
Learning how & when to move camera: PT Anderson, Max Ophüls, Ramon Zürcher, Wes Anderson, Orson Welles.
Week 28
Old Hollywood grandeur. Presented without comment: forgetting about context and just trying to enjoy the image. One Tobe Hooper film at the end of every day of screenings.
Week 29
Classic Criticism: close readings of Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Otis Ferguson, Roger Ebert, Cahiers Du Cinema, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Lindsay Anderson.
Week 30
Modern Criticism: Kent Jones, J Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dan Sallitt, Daniel Kasman, Ryland Walker Knight, Molly Haskell, Linda Williams, Miriam Bale, Keith Uhlich, Calum Marsh, David Cairns, Wesley Morris, Armond White, Aaron Cutler, Fernando Croce, Ben Sachs and more. Students will write about a film meaningful to them.
Week 31
Video Essays: Haroun Farocki, Kevin B. Lee, Matt Zoller Seitz, Chris Marker, Nelson Carvajal. Students will make a film without once picking up a camera.
Week 32
Cinematography masterclass: How to hide truth in sumptuousness, and how to properly film Tilda Swinton: The Conformist, Apocalypse Now Redux, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Pandora & The Flying Dutchman, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, I Am Love, The Limits of Control, Ashes of Time Redux, We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Week 33
Week off: no film or TV watching allowed. Students will go to museums and look at paintings, read poetry and listen to classical music and RnB.
Week 34
Ken Russell & early work of Andrzej Żuławski. Students will train for steadicam pentathlon.
Week 35
Werner Herzog. We'll see if we can meet him by a waterfall at the end of the week.
Week 36
Weird, independent America (Coleman Francis, George Romero, Ted Mikels, Ray Dennis Steckler, Eagle Pennell, Jim Jarmusch)
Week 36
Independent African cinema.
Week 37
Westerns, how history talks to itself.
Week 38
Modern textural filmmaking: The Turin Horse, Joe, Guy Maddin, Albert Serra, Hard To Be A God, Michael Mann, Phillipe Grandrieux.
Week 39
Film Noir landmarks. Students will rearrange the lighting scheme in eight different rooms to change psychological profile of the space.
Week 40
Soviet Cinema
Week 41
Landmarks of feminist cinema: Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Arzner, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, and The Wasp Woman.
Week 42
Landmarks of feminist cinema part 2: Akerman, Breillat, Chytilová, Campion, Coppola, and more.
Week 43
North American Melodrama/Fassbinder. Start drafting final projects: one feature, format up to students.
Week 44
Write & edit final projects, run dialogue with each other and start casting.
Week 45
Black independent American cinema: From LA Rebellion to streaming.
Week 46
Bresson in colour / Buñuel in Paris
Week 47
John Ford, (closing night screening: If....)
Week 48
Film projects. Nightly showing of dailies.
Week 49
Editing, midnight movies on loop in breakroom (El Topo, The Ruling Class, The Savages, 13 Assassins, Putney Swope, Below The Belt, Bohachi Bushido, Mark of the Devil, Horrors of Malformed Men, The Holy Mountain, the complete David Lynch, Sweet Movie, Mr. Freedom, Mansion of Madness, Who Could Kill a Child?, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde)
Week 50
Show final films. Celebrate by going drinking with guest lecturers Pedro Costa, Hong Sang-Soo & Lisandro Alonso.
