Going to film school is an expensive luxury that not everyone can afford across the world. It's also one of those things that is not necessary at all if you want to succeed in film and television.

One of the things I have admired about people online today is that they're grabbing the film school curricula from prestigious schools and placing them online where you or anyone with a library card and some time can study them for free.

The latest one I saw posted comes from Yale.

Let's dive in.

In case you don't want to zoom in on the text for those tweets, I took the liberty of making them into a more legible thing here.

Yale's Film Studies Course Curriculum

Early Film Theories

  • Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Richard Abel, French Film Theory
  • Georg Lukács, “Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema,” (1913), in McCormick, Guenther-Pal, pp. 11-16
  • Béla Balázs, “Sketches for a Theory of Film,” from Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film, (Berghahn Books, 2010), 17-84.
  • Jean Epstein, “Le cinematographe vu de l’Etna” in Jean Epstein Critical Essays 287-310.
  • Dziga Vertov, “We: variant of a manifesto” (1922) and “Kinoks: a Revolution” (1923) in Kino.Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, University of California Press, 1984
  • Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”; “Word and Image”

2. Art and Media in the 1930s

  • Rudolph Arnheim, chapters 1-3, in Film as Art
  • Erwin Panofsky, “Style and medium in the Motion Pictures,” [1934] in Angela Dalle Vacche, The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, 69-84.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility”

3. Postwar Film Theory

  • Andre Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” “Myth of Total Cinema,” “Montage Prohibited,” “The Italian School of Neorealism”
  • Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Chapters 1-4, and 14.
  • Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, pp 1-75

4. Semiotics, Ideology

  • Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film”
  • Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cinema of Poetry”
  • Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” in Image Music Text
  • Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology
  • Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
  • Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

5. Apparatus, Psychoanalysis

  • Christian Metz, “Identification, Mirror” from Imaginary Signifier
  • J-L Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Philip Rosen, ed, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, Columbia Univ. Press, pp. 286-298.
  • Michel Chion, ch 1 “Projections of Sound on Image”; ch 4 “The Audio-Visual Scene” in Audio-Vision
  • Jonathan Sterne, “Hello!” from The Audible Past
  • Edmund Carpenter and M. McLuhan, “Acoustic Space,” from Explorations in Communications
  • Altman, Rick (1986). “Television/Sound.” In Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Indiana University Press)

6. Media and Social Formation

  • Richard Dyer, “White,” from Screen, v 29 (1988)
  • World Cinema
    • Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936)
    • María Candelaria (Fernández, México, 1943)
    • Los Olvidados (Buñuel, México, 1950)
    • Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
    • Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
    • Panther Panchli (Ray, 1955)
    • Cruel Story of Youth (Oshima, 1960)
    • Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1964)
    • Black Girl (Sembene, 1966)
    • Double Suicide (Shinoda, 1969)
    • Sholay (Sippi, 1973)
    • Touki Bouki (Mambety, 1972)
  • Documentary
    • Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)
    • Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
    • Land without Bread (Buñuel, 1932)
    • Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956)
    • Primary (Leacock, 1960)
    • Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1961)
    • The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophuls, 1969)
  • Experimental
    • Entr’acte (Clair/Picabia, 1924)
    • Ballet Mecanique (Dudley Murphy, Fernand Léger, 1924)
    • Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali, 1928)
    • Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935)
    • Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1944)
    • Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953)
    • Dog Star Man (Prelude), Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1961)
  • New Voices 1977-1990
    • Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978)
    • Illusions (Dash, 1982)
    • A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiou-Hsien, Taiwan, 1985)
    • When Father Was Away on Business (Kusturica, Yugoslavia, 1985)
    • Yeelen (Cissé, Mali, 1987)
    • Where is the Friend’s House (Kiarostami, Iran, 1988)
    • Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou, PRC, 1988)
    • Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
    • Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, USA, 1989)
  • Silent Shorts
    • Before the Nickelodeon
    • The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903)
    • A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902)
    • The Lonely Villa (Gri?th, 1909) (Slightly illegible, likely Griffith)
  • Silent Features
    • The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)
    • Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915) (Slightly illegible, likely Griffith)
    • Within Our Gates (Micheaux, 1920)
    • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920)
    • Sherlock Junior (Keaton, 1924)
    • Nosferatu (Murnau, 1921) (Note: year listed might be slightly off standard filmographies, usually 1922)
    • Metropolis (Lang, 1925)
    • Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
    • Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
    • Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
  • Sound Features
    • — U.S.A.
      • The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927)
      • Blonde Venus (von Sternberg, 1932)
      • It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934)
      • Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
      • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
      • Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
      • His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
      • Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
      • Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
      • Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952)
      • The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
      • Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1969)
      • Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1969)
      • Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles, 1971)
      • Badlands (Malick, 1973)
      • The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
      • Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
    • — Europe
      • M (Lang, 1930)
      • A Nous la liberté (Clair, 1931)
      • L’Atalante (Vigo, 1934)
      • Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)
      • Paisà (Rossellini, 1946)
      • Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1947)
      • La dolce vita (Fellini, 1959)
      • Hiroshima Mon Amor (Resnais, 1959)
      • Pickpocket (Bresson, 1960)
      • Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962)
      • Playtime (Tati, 1966)
      • Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
      • Persona (Bergman, 1966)
      • Loves of a Blonde (Forman, 1966)
      • Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)
      • The Red and the White (Jansco, 1967)
      • Aguirre the Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
      • Ali Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)

More Essential Texts of Film Studies

  • Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” in Signatures of the Visible
  • Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” and “What is this ‘black’ in Black Popular Culture”
  • H.A. Innis, “The Basis of Communication,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 15 no4 (Nov. 1949) 457-476.
  • Marshall McLuhan, “Technology and Political Change,” International Journal 7, no 3 (1952), 189-195; and “Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process,” Renascence, Fall 1951
  • James Carey, “Technology and Ideology: the case of the Telegraph,” from Communication as Culture (Routledge, 1989), 201-230.
  • James Carey, “A cultural approach to communication,”
  • Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society,” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form

7. Cultural History, Modernity

  • Jacques Aumont, “The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze,” in Image in Dispute, 231-258
  • Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions”
  • Miriam Hansen, “The Mass production of the senses: Classical Cinema ad Vernacular Modernism,” in L. Williams, ed. Reinventing Film Studies
  • Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, parts 1 and 7.
  • Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” [in Film/Genre]

8. Philosophy, Aesthetics

  • Stanley Cavell, from More of The World Viewed sections 1-4, and conclusion.
  • Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement Image, ch 1-4; Cinema 2: the Time Image, chs 1, 4.

9. Alternative Modes of Film

  • Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema” [in Robert Stam, ed., Film Theory]
  • Philip Rosen, “Document and Documentary: on the Persistence of Historical Concepts” in Change Mummified
  • Brian Winston, “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription” in Renov, Theorizing Documentary
  • Stan Brakhage, From “Metaphors on Vision” in Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film, 120-128.
  • Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film

Analyzing These Studies

I see a lot fo standard books on film and TV here as well as many famous short anf feature films that people traditionally study in school.

One thing my friend and colleague Leah Thomas pointed out was that "This syllabus has only 1.) two films by women directors that are 2.) short films and 3.) categorized under experimental and new voices. There’s no reason to present female filmmakers as a novelty to students."

This is pretty astute.

And I also think this relies on a lot of older titles that maybe don't translate the lessons we want students to learn or draw more diverse voices into filmmaking, because the examples they're using are a bit dated.

Now, I don't know which professor uses this stuff, but I think finding a way to balance the classics juxtaposed against modern filmmaking is generally better for students understanding lessons and also being able to dissect and analyze films closer to what the majority of them will watch every day.

But, if you just want a general knowledge of film history, I bet this course and these books help.

Let me know what you think in the comments.
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