About Film at Summer Classics

The information below is from Summer 2024 and is kept on the website to demonstrate the kinds of seminars that are offered. All new seminars and descriptions will be announced for 2025.

Over the course of the three-week program, we develop a technical understanding of the style and vocabulary of cinema, while simultaneously learning to recognize each film as a distinctive work of art. Along the way, we become better viewers of film and deeper thinkers about the cinematic art form.

Students may enroll in one, two, or all three of the seminar weeks. Each week presents a self-contained, individualized curriculum. Participants are encouraged to view all movies before arriving on campus; copies of the films and a suitable viewing area are also provided by the college for students’ use before each class. If you need assistance viewing the films prior to arrival on campus, please contact Summer Classics at classics(at)sjc.edu.

Summer 2024 Film Seminars

Film seminars are one afternoon session daily: 2–4 p.m. MDT, with optional film screening times in the mornings and evenings.

Satyajit Ray: The Apu Trilogy

David Carl and Aparna Ravilochan
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 8–12, 2024
IN-PERSON

Satyajit Ray is widely acclaimed as the most influential Indian director in the development of world cinema and one of the greatest movie directors of all time, and these three films, centering around the life of Apu, are his masterpieces. At once intense dramas of domesticity, human love, and tragedy set in rural Bengal and urban Calcutta in the decade after independence from England, they are quiet triumphs of the human spirit and stunning works of cinematic beauty and technical innovation. Ray’s transgenerational portrayal of Apu’s coming-of-age story, from child to adult over the course of these three movies, is beautifully filmed with a brilliant soundtrack by Ravi Shankar that helped introduce Indian music to a wider Western audience.

Film: Satyajit Ray, The Apu Trilogy. The Criterion Collection

AI in Film: Kubrick, Scott, Jonze

David Carl and Clara Picker
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 15–19, 2024
IN-PERSON

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) all imagine possible consequences of the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity. While each movie approaches this topic in its own way and from distinct historical vantage points, all three ask what sort of relationships are possible between human beings and AI, and how these relationships play out in the context of different societies. Taken together, these three movies represent a 45-year span of cinema’s engagement with the question of how AI might change the human condition.

Films:

• Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
• Spike Jonze, Her

Sergio Leone’s Two Western Epics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West

Natalie Elliot and Eric Salem
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 22–26, 2024
IN-PERSON

Is it ironic that two of the greatest films about the American West and our emerging sense of national identity were created by an Italian filmmaker who shot them in Europe? Leone’s two Western epics (also referred to as spaghetti Westerns) further developed the themes and styles of great American filmmakers like John Ford to tell the story of America’s Civil War and westward expansion through the eyes of a European sensibility—not unlike de Tocqueville’s brilliant insights into American democracy penned 130 years earlier. In addition to being two of the greatest and most ambitious films made in the tradition of the American Western, Leone’s movies are stories of greed, violence, passion, and revenge that helped raise both Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to international stardom and feature brilliant performances by actors such as Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Woody Strode.

Films:

• Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the West