I use movie clips in most of the classes I teach to reinforce visually some of the primary themes from class readings. Most of the clips I show are in the 3-5 minute range. Some of them come from films that are wonderful. Others are wonderful scenes though the movies are less terrific. What follows is a list and short critique of the films I use or recommend in my class syllabi. I will extend the list as come around to teach each of the classes again.
Before I suggest specific films, I should point out that filmmaker's first goal is to make successful films, not to present the past "as it actually was," so many of the films I suggest here are deficient in a host of ways. Since my comments here are brief, I suggest Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, which examines a batch of films and contrasts the history of the period with its presentation in film.
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This is an image from Judith Baca's mural of Los Angeles.
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SPECIFIC COURSES:
HUMANITIES 4 & 5: ARTS & IDEAS
HUMANITIES 9: AMERICAN IDENTITIES IN THE ARTS
HUMANITIES 10: WORLD RELIGIONS
HUMANITIES 11: RELIGION IN AMERICA
HUMANITIES 4 & 5: ARTS & IDEAS
There are a number of movies that would help give students a sense of the cultures covered in the Arts & Ideas sequence (Humanities 4 and 5). Despite the central importance of ancient Greece in western culture, however, there are surprisingly few films on the life and culture of ancient Greece. The best that I am aware of is Iphigenia, which is based on the Euripides play. It is set just prior to the departure of the Greek army for Troy, and it gives a nice sense of the character of Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Though Achilles is a character, he does not have the central role here that he does in the Iliad. A contemporary film that I think reflects very effectively on the Iliad is Boys in the Hood, where the themes of loyalty and revenge are very powerfully conveyed
By contrast, there is no shortage of films on ancient Rome. Spartacus treats a slave result which actually took place around 70 BC and gives a nice sense of late Republican aristocratic culture in Rome. Cleopatra is based (very loosely) on Shakespeare's play, which in turn made liberal use of Plutarch's Lives, and gives an interesting sense of Roman life and values at the end of the Republic. Fellini's Satyricon is challenging to watch and focuses of the depravity of the early Roman Empire. The PBS series I, Claudius provides a very interesting portrait of "family" life at the center of the Roman empire, where it was a rare person who died a natural death. Many students will have seen Gladiator, with its high tech recreation of the Coliseum.
The emergence of Christianity and Islam are important themes in Humanities 4, and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ emphasizes the human aspects of Jesus in a film based on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel. The Message treats early Islam, though from a rather more orthodox perspective. Monastic life in the Middle Ages can be seen through The Name of the Rose, based on the best selling murder mystery by Umberto Eco. Brother Sun, Sister Moon goes to the opposite extreme in presenting a very sweet picture of the life of St. Francis. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal provides a picture of apocalyptic fears following the Black Death. Finally, Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole do a lovely job presenting the family politics of the early modern nation state in The Lion in Winter. A young Anthony Hopkins does quite a god job as a young Richard the Lion Hearted, later of crusades fame.
Humanities 5 opens in the renaissance, and a fascinating portrait of the literary and sexual politics of the era can be found in Dangerous Beauty, which is set in the Venice. Though the acting in The Agony & the Ecstasy is modest (to my taste) the scenes which depict Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling on an enormous scaffold and with a host of helpers is technically quite interesting. Some sense of the northern Renaissance can be had through Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love. The life of Mozart, perhaps the greatest genius in the history of music, is presented in Amadeus. The life of Beethoven is presented in Immortal, Invisible, while the life and times of George Sand and Frederic Chopin is presented in Impromptu.
The French Revolution has been widely presented in film, with Danton being one of the most interesting versions. The French Revolution of 1830 is the subject of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, for which there are multiple film versions. The sexual politics of the revolutionary era are presented in Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont. Since one of the most dramatic forces shaping 20th century culture is warfare, All Quiet on the Western Front, Dr. Strangelove, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour take very different looks at that depressing topic.
HUMANITIES 9: AMERICAN IDENTITIES IN THE ARTS
Humanities 9, American Identities in the Arts, examines the various problems of American cultural identity. You might want to review the syllabus (elsewhere on the site) to get a sense of the books these films relate to.
One film I show short clips from in a variety of my classes is The Joy Luck Club, which looks at the dynamic of four Chinese-American families around the dynamic of mother-daughter relationships. Mothers who grew up in China struggle to raise their daughters "properly" in San Francisco, with mixed success. Another film which begins in San Francisco is Peter Wang's A Great Wall, which profiles an American family which travels to Beijing for a family reunion, with humorous results. (Don't confuse Peter Wang with Wayne Wang, the director of Joy Luck Club.)
The legacy of the experience of the Holocaust is the subject of Sophie's Choice, based on William Styron's novel. It features Meryl Streep in one of the roles that helped earn her reputation as one of the most accomplished actresses of her generation.
There is a growing list of interesting films on Native American identity. I particularly like Powwow Highway, which plays to contrasting Indian stereotypes off of one another. Greg Sarris's HBO film Grand Avenue includes a character very loosely based on his mentor, Mabel McKay. Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing have the virtue of having been produced by primarily Indian crews.
Two films which take very different looks at juggling family and sexual identity are My Vida Loca and My Beautiful Laundrette, the first set in LA and the second in London. Both films examine class and sexuality if very nicely complicated story lines.
The world of American jazz can be appreciated through a variety of films, including The Cotton Club, Bird, and Ken Burns' documentary, Jazz. The complex world of African American culture before the Civil Rights movement is depicted in When We Were Colored and Beloved, while Spike Lee's Malcolm X does quite a nice job paying homage to the book and the man.
HUMANITIES 10: WORLD RELIGIONS
There are three particularly interesting films which reflect on primal religions. Walkabout is Nicolas Roeg's film about two English children left in the Australian outback after their father's suicide, whose survival is made possible by their encounter with an Aboriginal boy on his "walkabout," a rite of passage from youth to adulthood. The Emerald Forest is John Boorman's 1985 film about an engineer who "loses" his seven year old son to an Amazonian tribe and his reunion ten years later after the boy has been thoroughly acculturated into the tribe. Powwow Highway is one of many films about Native Americans. Made in 1985 by Jonathan Wacks, its virtue is the way its two main characters (Buddy and Philbert) present two very different images of making the transition from traditional to modern cultural attitudes.
There are no films directly on Confucianism or Taoism, but there are a few films on China that work nicely. Wayne Wang's The Joy Luck Club (1993) does a wonderful job translating Amy Tan's book to the screen and exploring the problems of family obligation in Confucian shaped Chinese-American families. Peter Wang's film, A Great Wall (1985), explores similar terrain, as a Chinese American family visits Beijing to renew family ties, and both the Chinese and American branches of the family struggle to make sense of the other's life. There is a wonderful short scene of the American father doing Tai Chi that I show in class. Though it was not made to depict Taoism, Koyaanisqatsi (1983) focuses on a Hopi Indian word translated as "life out of balance" and provides striking visual imagery of human beings living both in and out of harmony with the natural world, a central concern to Taoism.
There are a number of films on India in which Hinduism appears in the background. Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi won Oscars for best actor, director and film. It does not emphasize the theological elements of Hinduism, but it does an excellent job reflecting the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India and Gandhi's attempt to persuade the two groups to live in harmony, an attempt that makes more sense to the Hindu perspective than to the Muslim one.
We'll read the Bhagavad Gita in class, a chapter in a the much longer Indian epic, the Mahabharata (great battle). There is a film version of the Mahabharata that spans three mostly full video cassettes in which all of the Gita goes by in about 7 minutes. I have never seen it in video stores, but the Riverside IMC on the city campus has all three tapes and you can view it on campus. I show the Bhagavad Gita sequence in class.
There are two interesting films on Buddhism. Bernardo Bertulucci's Little Buddha (1994) and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997). Little Buddha weaves together two stories, one on the life of Siddharta (who would become the Buddha) and one set in the present. I would have liked the film much better if the present day story had been left out altogether. Filming in parts in gorgeous and Keanu Reeves isn't as bad as Siddhartha as I usually suggest in class--still, you may want to fast forward through some scenes. Kundun is similar to Seven Years in Tibet but focuses more directly on the life of the 14th Dalai Lama (who is still alive, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989). Kundun does a good job presenting Tibetan Buddhism, is visually beautiful, and uses a very nice score by Philip Glass.
There are many interesting films in which Judaism is prominently featured. The 10 Commandments and Prince of Egypt both treat the same formative aspect of Judaism, both with a tremendous amount of embellishment. I particularly like the way Stranger Among Us, a 1992 film directed by Sidney Lumet which stars Melanie Griffith as a street smart NYC cop assigned to solve a murder in the Hassidic Jewish community. The film does a nice job showing aspects of Orthodox Judaism in its present day aspect. I also like Boaz Yakin's 1998 film A Price Above Rubies in which Renee Zellweger plays an Orthodox Jewish woman who doesn't quite fit into her own community; this film takes a less sympathetic look at Judaism than the others and I wouldn't recommend you see it first.
There are more films on Christianity than other religions, at least in our part of the world. Many of them present Christianity in a fairly traditional and literalistic fashion, which will overlap what many viewers already know. The Greatest Story Ever Told falls in this vein, as does Ben Hur to a less degree. Two particularly interesting films which take a more unorthodox approach are Jesus of Montreal and The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus of Montreal is a 1989 French Canadian film in which the non-religious actor cast to play Jesus in an Easter passion play has his view of the world slowly morph in the course of the film, while Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 Last Temptation of Christ (based on the novel by Nikos Kazantkasis) emphasizes the human aspect of Jesus where most films emphasize the divine. The movie is quite orthodox by the end though its route there is emphatically not. Another movie that blends orthodox content with very unorthodox style is Kevin Smith's Dogma. The story is highly improbably (to say the least,: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon play fallen angels and Alanis Morisette plays God) but the theological principles on which its based--good and evil, sin and redemption) are very orthodox--Smith is evidently practicing Catholic Christian himself.
Two interesting films that reflect on Islam are Mohammed, Messenger of God and Spike Lee's Malcolm X. Mohammed, Messenger of God (also called The Message) is sort of The Ten Commandments of Islam, with Charlton Heston replaced by Anthony Quinn. The film focuses on the rise of Islam as it confronts and overcomes deeply entrenched opposition. Spike Lee's 1992 Malcolm X doesn't focus on Islam, but Malcolm's late encounter with Islam as a result of undertaking his hajj (pilgrimage) is rendered very nicely in the film.
HUMANITIES 11: RELIGION IN AMERICA
Movies on Americans are abundant, as are films on religion, though films that treat religion in a specifically American context are not so plentiful. Nevertheless, since I will be teaching Humanities 11 this spring, I will be working to update this part of the page.
If there's any subject that Hollywood has made buckets of money on, it's death, and trying to distill a list of films on the subject is rather daunting. Once again, looking at the books for the course will help give you some idea why I suggest these particular films.
No film can summarize "Indian attitudes toward death," but the HBO film Last of His Tribe does a nice job of looking at the life of Ishi, a California Yahi Indian, very nicely played by Graham Greene. The Joy Luck Club, which I suggest in connection with a variety of classes, revolves around a daughter's family obligation after her mother's death.
Though its focus is not directly on death, the film version of The Mahabharata is quite an interesting film. Though it is very hard to find in video stores, the RCC City Campus IMC has a copy which can be viewed on campus. A Tibetan Buddhism view of death can be found in Martin Scorsese's Kundun on the life of the current Dalai Lama. The theme of death and reincarnation is also the focus of What Dreams May Come.
Though there are many fine (and disturbing) films on the Holocaust, I particularly suggest Europa, Europa. A little-known German film (in subtitles), it focuses on the bizarre survival of Solomon Perel, a Jew in SS School. If you haven't seen Shindler's List, you should.
Finally, a humorous critique of the medical perspective on life and death can be found in Patch Adams (the second Robin Williams film on the list). For the early history of AIDS, And the Band Played On is an excellent film which is part drama and part documentary. For a wholly and moving dramatic treatment, see Philadelphia.