Wednesdays, March 9-23, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

This course will review a selection of motion pictures that have forever transformed our world. Some of them, like The Birth of a Nation (1915), threw a racist bomb into contemporary politics; others, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, expanded our vision of the future. Still others, like the work of Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, used comedy and animation to deliver satiric jabs at our popular culture. The medium of the motion picture itself has been radically transformed by experiments in storytelling by filmmakers like Ken Burns, in his documentaries about the Civil War, jazz and baseball.