Film History 101 with Netflix Instant

In a blog post titled The Two Best Things on the Web 2010 Frank Chimero said

Large clearing houses of media where customers pay for access, such as Rdioand Netflix’s Watch Instantly could potentially be boons for any SurveyCast. One could construct a whole curriculum about film history and use only films available on to watch instantly on Netflix. Your guide’s effort could be as small as a series of blogposts that give Forewords and Afterwords to string together each film in the sequence, or as thorough and impressive as what Matt Zoller Seitz did for his video essays on Wes Anderson and Clint Eastwood.

I suppose I’m hungry for curated educational materials online. These are more than lists of books to read: they’re organized, edited, and have a clear point of view about the content they are presenting, and subvert the typical scatter-shot approach of half the web (like Wikipedia), or the hyper-linear, storyless other half that obsesses over lists. And that’s the frustrating thing about trying to teach yourself things online: you’re new, so you don’t know what’s important, but everything is spread so thin and all over the place, so it’s difficult to make meaningful connections.

I find a lot of incredibly fascinating ideas about the future of education (especially institutional education), the Internet, open access and other related issues embedded in what Chimero discusses in his post that has my brain firing in way too many directions right now.

The real reason that I'm posting this here is because someone did take him up on the offer of creating a Film History 101 course using Netflix Instant.  The list has 33 films and all of them are pre-1970s and available on Netflix Instant.  It's too bad that the individual films are not annotated or strung together with some sort of educational/historical narrative as to why these films are important.

I think that part of the reason that I have not seen a lot of classics is because I never really knew where to start.  I never took any cinema classes in college and had no friends whom I could consider an authority on the topic.  As someone who watches a lot of lectures and talks online, I am always looking for interesting things like this - what Chimero calls "curated educational materials online."  I'm sure that something like this is actually the way education will occur more in the future.  I can learn more from one day of dedicated self-teaching about a topic online than I can from an entire class.

Anyway, before I go off ranting about our educational system, I'll stop and say this: it strikes me that you guys could probably come up with a really great list/course/annotated bibliography/etc. like the above.  Extra points for including reasons, questions, facts and some sort of connecting narrative.

EDIT: While I've been typing this I see John has put up a post that could be considered related to all this.  I'm embarrassed to say that I've only seen two of the movies on your list.  I'll right that wrong soon.