Screen Studies

The exam will require students to be familiar with the areas treated below: history, genre, theory, and international cinema. Each of the questions on the screen studies exams address an important issue in the study of film that asks for an in-depth analysis of key films and issues in screen studies. For each question, students must choose appropriate primary and secondary works to discuss. Thus, they may choose to use or discuss films and texts listed below, but they might also choose other, similarly appropriate texts and films. The list, especially the film list, is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive; it is, rather, an attempt to suggest the kind and range of films that students should know. Nothing about this list, for example, precludes the possibility that an exam might include a question about a genre that would require the students to discuss three examples of that type of film even though three such examples are not to be found on the list.

(More information about the MA Qualifying Exam can be found in the Guidelines.)

History

Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the Movies , Robert Sklar
A History of Narrative Film , David Cook
Black American Cinema , ed. Manthia Diawara
The Columbia Companion to American History on Film and Television, ed. Peter C. Rollins
Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film , Emanuel Levy
Tube of Plenty , Eric Barnouw
Film History: Theory and Practice , eds. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery

Films
Birth of a Nation ( D. W. Griffith 1915 )
Sunrise (F. W. Murnau 1927)
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang ( Mervyn Leroy 1932)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch 1932)
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin 1936)
Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943)
The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli 1953)
Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller 1953)
Dr. Strangelove ( Stanley Kubrick 1964)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Melvin Van Peebles (1971)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese 1980)

International

The Oxford History of World Cinema , ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Republic of Images : A History of French Filmmaking , Alan Larson Williams
The Japanese Film: Art and Industry , Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie
Italian Film: From Neorealism to the Present , Peter Bondanella
New German Cinema: A History , Thomas Elsaesser

Films
Fantômas (Louis Feuillade 1913-14)
The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjøstrøm 1918)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang 1933)
Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio da Sica 1948)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu 1949)
Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa 1962)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel 1962)
La Jetée (Chris Marker 1962)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman 1966)
Sholay (Ramesh Sippy 1975)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1979)

Genre

Film Genre Reader II , ed., Barry Keith Grant
Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System , Thomas Schatz
Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama , ed., Marcia Landry
The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video , Jack Ellis
Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader , ed. Steven Cohan
Horror: The Film Reader , ed. Mark Jancovich
More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts , James Naremore
Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 , P. Adams Sitney

Films
The Public Enemy (William Wellman 1931)
Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright 1936)
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
“Prelude to War” from Why We Fight (Frank Capra 1942)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer 1945)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946)
Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952)
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk 1955)
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah 1969)
The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)

Film Theory

Film Theory and Criticism , 6 th ed., eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
Narration in the Fiction Film , David Bordwell, 1987.
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture , Slavoj Žižek
Feminism and Film , ed. E. Ann Kaplan
What Is Cinema (Vol. 1), Andre Bazin.
The Women Who Knew Too Much , Tania Modleski
Channels of Discourse Reassembled , ed., Robert C. Allen
Logics of Television , ed., Patricia Mellencamp
Visible Fictions, John Ellis

Films
The Movies Begin , esp. vols. 1-2 (Kino Video Collection)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920)
Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein 1925)
Golddiggers of 1933 (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley 1933)
The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg 1934
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir 1939)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks 1953)
Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell 1960)
Suture (Scott McGehee and David Siegel 1993)
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

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English Department
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Oklahoma State University
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Statement of
"Organic Knowledge"
for Literature and Screen Studies

A student with "organic knowledge" of the reading lists will

1. understand the way individual texts reflect the material and intellectual conditions of the time of their production; this means that the student can perceive an author's work in reference to history, including literary or film history, and to contemporary social and philosophical issues;

2. consider the way texts exemplify the major concerns and formal features that critics have associated with literary or film periods, movements, and genres; further, the student will be aware of the ways that texts change, depart from, or undermine the conventions of movements or periods to which they belong;

3. in summary, be able, on request, to forge links between author or filmmakers, their individual works, and various intellectual, social, and aesthetic traditions, when applicable.