AIM: How can we develop an appreciation for a wide variety of films? DO NOW: What genre of movie to you enjoy the most?

“Journals” In addition to quizzes, journals will make up a significant part average. Journals will be on a variety of topics and will often require personal responses, critiques, and analysis. Journals should be approximately one handwritten page long (around 150 words).

Here is a list of some the films that we will view: Son of the Sheik Stagecoach Casablanca On the Waterfront Psycho The Birds Night of the Living Dead The Graduate E.T. Jaws

Detailed summaries of most of the movies we will view in class can be found at:

Silent Film Era These are the films of the early era that were without synchronized sound, from the earliest film (around 1891), until 1927, when the first 'talkie', The Jazz Singer (1927) was produced.The Jazz Singer (1927) Calling them silent films is something of a misnomer - movie theatres provided pianists and other sound machines, and some films were produced with complete musical scores. Most early silents were accompanied with a full-fledged orchestra, organist or pianist to provide musical background and to underscore the narrative on the screen. Some even had live actors or narrators. Many early silent films were either dramas, epics, romances, or comedies (often slapstick). One-reelers (10-12 minutes) soon gave way to four-reel feature-length films.

Son of the Sheik The first movie we will be viewing is Son of the Sheik. It was a very popular silent film, mostly because of its star, Rudolph Valentino.

Rudolph Valentino ( ): The greatest male attraction in exotic, adventurous romantic pictures was handsome, hot-blooded Italian-born import Rudolph Valentino, after his breakthrough appearance in the famous tango scene in director Rex Ingram's spectacle The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Dubbed the "Latin Lover," the matinee idol symbolized the forbidden and mysterious eroticism denied to American women in the 1920s in such films as The Sheik (1921), Camille (1921), the successful Blood and Sand (1922), The Eagle (1925), and The Sheik's popular sequel The Son of the Sheik (1926). The Son of the Sheik was a tremendous hit, released at the time of Valentino's funeral. In 1926, his death came at the untimely age of 31, due to a perforated ulcer and peritonitis. Crowds in New York, mostly female mourners, verged on mass hysteria as they tried to view his body. [One of Valentino's legacies was that a brand of popular condoms was named after his role in one of his most famous films.] Native-born director Clarence Brown, who had directed Valentino in The Eagle (1925) also directed imported actress Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1927), Woman of Affairs (1928), and turn-of-the-decade Anna Christie (1930).