A survey of the British cinema from the Thirties to the present day, with some attention to literary parallels and literary adaptations, and with a look at recent television drama. We’ll begin with Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, sampling the possible approaches - historical, auteur-based, formalist, critical - to this drama about class, race, and personality in contemporary Britain. After that, we’ll view and discuss a broad range of British screen work. Among the possibilities are: World War II melodramas by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death) and wartime documentaries by Humphrey Jennings; two kitchen-sink films of the early Sixties (Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey) sandwiched between more documentary work, both early (Night Mail, with a poem by Auden and music by Benjamin Britten) and late (Michael Apted’s 35 Up); screen versions of Graham Greene’s fiction (The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Brighton Rock), together with some of the fiction and a sampling of Greene’s film criticism; film by and about multicultural Britain (Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting); adaptations of Shakespeare (Richard Loncraine’s Richard III); the “heritage” cinema of Merchant-Ivory (The Remains of the Day), with a comparative look at heritage television in Upstairs, Downstairs; a selection of spy and gangster stories-a thriller by the young Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps), Alan Bennett’s based-on-real-life television drama A Question of Attribution, and Dennis Potter’s magisterial based-on-hallucination television serial The Singing Detective; comedy from the Ealing Studio (Kind Hearts and Coronets), from British television, and from contemporary filmmakers like Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty). Towards the end of the semester we’ll study a film picked by the class.

There will be occasional readings in George Orwell, Greene, Shakespeare, and Kazuo Ishiguro, but the main work of the course will be viewing the films, and as I trust the list above makes clear we’ll see a lot of them- sometimes three and often two a week. I’ll set up regular screening times to suit the largest number of students, but if you can’t make those times you will always have the option of seeing the films on your own in the Nonprint Resources Center, where all the screen work for the class will be kept on reserve.

Written work: a short exercise in annotating a film list; two short essays; a midterm exam and a final exam. In class I’ll lecture but also ask questions and encourage discussion whenever it seems called for. Prerequisite: at least one college course in English literature or film, or permission of the instructor.