With homage to the Turner Movie Channel's series called "The Essentials," Lehigh's "American Film: The Essentials" is a course designed to foster intelligent conversation among students from all corners of the university about classic older films widely recognized as among the most entertaining and significant in our culture.
Course units - usually three or four films in length - will focus on an actor or actress, a director, a genre, or a theme.
In the fall 2006 inaugural semester, our topics were the Western (Shane, High Noon, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven) and Brando (Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, On the Waterfront, and The Godfather). In the near future there will be units on director Frank Capra and on Cold War films.
This web site is our living course "yearbook," a place where students in the Essentials leave an example of their thinking about these classic films as well as, in some cases, by "signing" the entry of a classmate, a last interaction representative of the "culture of conversation" on which the course is based.
For further information, contact Prof. Edward J. Gallagher by email at ejg1@lehigh.edu.
Choose which gallery you want to view from the links above.