Masterpieces of European Cinema

The course covers some of the greatest films made in Europe over the past century.  It explores a question posed by many of the directors on the syllabus: how to make films that are, on the one hand, connected to their local and national realities, and which articulate, on the other, a broader geographical imagining, “Europe.”  Each of the films offers a kind of prism through which directors explore the shifting identity of Europe.  Interestingly, most of the films are from the so-called “margins” of Europe, not the core: e.g. Poland, Sweden, as well as from Turkey/Istanbul and Senegal.   Europe looks different from the perspective of a Senegalese immigrant attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy in a rickety boat.  Or from the point of view of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.  Such positionality, such shifting perspectives, are the through line that runs through the course.