Masters of Cinema

This course will explore the work of the Hollywood director Douglas Sirk, most famous for his 1950s Hollywood melodramasMagnificent Obsession (1954), All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959). The course will consider the films of this intensely productive period in some detail but it will also explore the film melodrama more broadly, considering its history, development and its critical significance. The course will consider Sirk’s status as a master filmmaker by exploring his entire career and it will examine the lasting influence and legacy of his films.

Michael Mann is one of the most distinctive and influential American filmmakers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Emerging at the end of the 1970s ‘New Hollywood’ era, Mann occupies a paradoxical position: historically “out of time,” yet formally ahead of his moment. From Thief (1981) to Heat (1995), Miami Vice (2006), and Blackhat (2015), his films explore crime, professionalism, masculinity, and solitude within an increasingly abstract, technologised world. The course situates Mann’s work within Hollywood history while also treating it as a lens through which to understand contemporary cinema and the modern world.

“I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.” Explore and immerse in the signature style and adventurous cinema of Todd Haynes from his emergence in the early 90s in the New Queer Cinema movement through pop culture history to highly stylised melodramas.