About Film at Summer Classics

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. Film screenings are offered on campus in the early evening hours, and additional morning opportunities are available in the classroom or library. If you need assistance viewing the films prior to arrival on campus, please contact Summer Classics at classics(at)sjc.edu.

Summer 2025 Film Seminars

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

Film, Trauma, and Memory

David Carl and Katie Kretler
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

Movies are a kind of time machine. Through their capacity to unite sound and image into powerful forms of storytelling, they carry us back to the past and into the future. The movies under discussion focus on how memory shapes our present and determines our future. Study films that move back and forth between past and future, including one of the most formally innovative time travel movies ever made, a landmark of the French New Wave, and a classic work of Japanese cinema ending with Sans Soleil, a profound meditation on memory, storytelling, and identity. These films, among the greatest ever made, challenge genres and conventional modes of storytelling, and they reflect on the role that memory plays in helping us navigate the traumas of our past and the hopes for our future.

Films:

• Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
• Chris Marker, La Jetée
• Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon Amour
• Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

Double Lives in the Films of Hitchcock

Nicholas Bellinson and Aparna Ravilochan
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Nearly all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films reveal a preoccupation with the question of identity. His works turn the issue around and around, asking: Is identity a stable thing, definable, decipherable to oneself? To anyone else? This seminar studies four Hitchcock thrillers that meditate masterfully on the subject: Shadow of A Doubt, Notorious, North by Northwest, and Vertigo. In these films, the Master of Suspense serves up a slate of Hollywood darlings, including Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, and Ingrid Bergman, as characters refracted into alter egos, namesakes, and mistaken or secret identities. The dizzying results challenge us to question what—and whom—we really know.

Films:

• Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt
• Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious
• Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest
• Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo

The Surrealist Film of Luis Buñuel

David Carl and Obed Lira
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

One of the most influential creators in the history of film, Luis Buñuel’s prolific career spans decades, from the age of silent film in the 1920s to commercially successful films in the 1970s. We explore four films that capture the essence of some of Buñuel’s distinct phases and obsessions: the iconoclastic, surrealist masterpiece Un chien andalou (1929), which he made with Salvador Dalí; the religious satire Simon of the Desert (1965); the mordant drama Viridiana (1961); and the savage and unforgiving The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1971). Although thematically very different, all of these films remain quintessential Buñuel, whose work, in the words of Octavio Paz, constitutes “a marriage of the film image to the poetic image creating a new reality, scandalous and subversive.”

Films:

• Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou
• Luis Buñuel, Simon of the Desert
• Luis Buñuel, Viridiana
• Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie