Critique of film sources [LHISB320]

Learning outcomes

- develop critical thinking and scientific reasoning skills; - develop specialist knowledge in areas of the historical discipline and understand the issues involved; - to acquire the techniques of analysis and interpretation of historical sources, as well as a reflective and critical awareness in the practice of the historical approach.

Objectives

This course does not aim to reconstruct the history of cinema in itself, but rather to examine the modes of encounter between history and cinema (history in cinema and history through cinema). The course is designed to enable students to analyse the relationship between a film and "the real", i.e. to describe the links between a cinematographic object and the society which produces it, to which it is addressed or which it attempts to represent.

Content

The first part of the course consists in giving reference points in terms of film history and cinematographic language. The second part is made up of case studies which, each in their own way, explore the relationship between cinema and history: Soviet films, American films produced under McCarthyism, Belgian films known as "du réel", films from May 68, and the work and reflections of great documentary filmmakers will thus be analysed.