20TH CENTURY EUROPE THROUGH FILM

The images available to us in movies, both feature films and documentaries, are valuable tools for studying the past. War is more powerfully imagined by non-veterans when it is conveyed through a movie depicting trench warfare (A Very Long Engagement). The tensions of the Cold War are more accessible in a movie that draws viewers into the lives of men and women surviving in and resisting a Communist state (The Lives of Others). Every film is also a primary source. Like a fourth-century vase or a nineteenth-century newspaper, it is a product of a specific set of conditions and intentions that have a lot to tell us about the time, place, and people that produced them. As such we will watch movies created by European directors, some of them made close to the events they depict, some of them well after the fact, which will allow us to examine the short twentieth century through film.