This course will focus on the American film industry during the 1970s and into the early 1980s. When Steven Spielberg¿s Jaws, understood as the first American blockbuster, was released in 1975 it radically changed the global distribution and marketing of film. Spielberg¿s film - like many blockbusters after it - was a mix of transgressive cinematic genres, advanced filmmaking techniques, and classical Hollywood narrative and form. While this class is focused on a ¿national¿ cinema our approach to the blockbuster will attend to this mix, which is the product of transnational and transhistorical economic and aesthetic forces. To that end we will screen films from Hollywood¿s ¿Golden Age,¿ other national cinemas, as well as genres associated with ¿grindhouse¿ and the avant-garde film.