Lesson 1 - The Quest for Self

This introductory program explains the organization and approach of the course: a study of how values are revealed in seven different art forms as seen from the perspectives of history, the elements of each specific art form, different forms of the arts and the meaning of these forms, and finally - from the perspective of critical evaluation. Definitions are offered for the terms "work of art" and "artistic form" and a beginning is made in learning how to "participate with" a work of art. Brief introductions are made of four special guests who appear in later programs on criticism. These guests are curator Donna Stein, poet Ann Stanford, painter Glen White, and film archivist Robert Rosen.

Lesson 2 - Film: Twentieth Century Legacy

"Film: Twentieth Century Legacy" is the first of four lessons that explore film, the contemporary art form that some critics believe to be the only true art form to emerge in the present century. Note is taken of the debate over whether film is chiefly a harmless form of mass entertainment or powerful engine of social influence. The conclusion is offered that film fills both roles. The focus of this lesson is the rapid development of film from a mere copy of other art forms to a mature, complex, and distinct form of its own. Some techniques, technologies, and persons who made this metamorphosis possible are introduced and clips form such early classic film as Birth of a Nation are shown.

Lesson 3 - Film: The Dynamic Illusion

This portion opens with the identification of camera, light and editing as the basic elements of film-making. It is emphasized that these elements alone and in themselves are not sufficient to be called "art", however, art in film-making depends upon how the elements are used and how they converge. From this discussion of elements, the program moves through a review of film-making techniques such as camera placement, camera movement, angle, music, and sound effects. These techniques and their use are demonstrated on excerpts from Rain, Psycho, The Pawnbroker, Citizen Kane, Wuthering Heights, My Man Godfrey, Battleship Potemkin, and The Great Train Robbery.

Lesson 4 - Film: Not Just the Great Escape

A much-honored British director. David Lean, makes use of his own extensive life's work to make this program a colorful and absorbing insight into the ways in which an artist expresses form and meaning in film. Lean tells of his work with Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter, and Bridge Over the River Kwai. Several film clips of Lean and his crews filming these movies on location are shown, and Lean speaks of the importance of the script, of actors, costumes, scenery, set construction, shooting on location, music, working with crowds, editing and criticism. Fittingly, Lean is brought to the program through a film of which he himself is the subject. Maya Angelou prefaces the Lean film with comments about the art and craft of the film director and specific notes about Lean's stature in the art.

Lesson 5 - Film: Seeing All There is

Once again the question of whether film is an art is raised - this time between Miss Angelou and University of California film archivist Robert Rosen. And it is affirmed that film is indeed an art form, though a complex one that has a collective nature because it involves the work of so many persons. Miss Angelou begins this interesting evaluation of film with the question, "But if film is art, who is the artist?" Miss Angelou and Mr. Rosen discuss the relationship of the director to the film, mentioning his attitudes and work patterns as important factors. Some opinions are offered to explain the evolution of many different forms of movies in the United States and to account for the influence of such diverse factors as geography and criticism. The program closes with a judgment by Mr. Rosen that a film can be at once both a "high art" form and a popular piece of entertainment.

Lesson 6 - Drama: An Imitation of Life

A main theme of this program is that conflict is the essence of drama and that this truth is as changeless as man's unending conflicts with himself and his world. The program opens by tracing the history of drama from its beginning in tribal dances, masks, and rituals of the Greek theatres of the centuries before Christ where drama developed first as a means of honoring gods, then evolved into the play as we know it today. The program continues with an account of drama as it changed and matured through the medieval period and the Renaissance period, which produced William Shakespeare. We view scenes from Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. This program closes with an examination of Ibsen's Doll House, which is presented as a play that is typical of modern drama's tendency to explore human relations.

Lesson 7 - Drama: Nucleus of a Story

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is dissected thoroughly by Maya Angelou in this program in order to examine in detail the elements of drama. Use of language, the technique of imitating life successfully, plot, and characterization are discussed. How strong characters can upstage a plot is demonstrated. Shaw's Pygmalion, a tragicomedy, emphasizes characters and their relationships rather than plot, and the play ends with questions - not resolutions - leaving the audience to speculate about the playwright's message in the play.

Lesson 8 - Drama: Meaning of Every Age

Through a study of Shakespeare's artistry, which many critics believe brought greatness to the theatre, this program reveals how the playwright invests a work of drama with form and meaning that can be timeless. A film featuring a recreation of an old English theatre with performers preparing for the production of a Shakespeare play is shown so that the viewer can better appreciate the true artistry of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Theatre construction is discussed as it affected play production, and a somewhat detailed look is taken at Shakespeare's ingenuity in making use of a limited stage and scarcity of scenery. The program closes with a commentary upon how, in turn, the physical characteristics of the stage influenced the writing of Shakespeare's plays.

Lesson 9 - Drama: Great Age Ahead

This program on criticism concludes the study unit on drama. Hal Marienthal and Frederick Shroyer join Maya Angelou in a discussion of many aspects of theatre. Dr. Marienthal is a professor of theatre arts, California State University, Long Beach; he is widely published and has produced more than twenty plays for the professional stage. Dr. Shroyer is professor emeritus of English and American Literature, California State University, Los Angeles. He is also an established author and former literary editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The so-called "great ages of drama" are discussed, and the importance of drama to the human spirit is stressed. Some attention is also given to the relevance of television as compared to staged drama. Dr. Marienthal concludes with the reaffirmation: "Drama is life, and it's life accentuated and polished and selectified."

Lesson 10 - Music: Age-Old Search for Meaning

"From all the evidence we have, it seems that every culture, every society know to exist, has make music." These words open the first of four programs devoted to the study of music. The program continues with a survey of the history of music, from sketchings of crude instruments made in the clay of southern Iran 6,000 years ago to the development of music in modern society. The evidence seems to be that in the beginning music was purely functional, servicing as an adjunct to other arts. Not until the Renaissance did music become a distinctly separate art. The development of today's many varied forms of music is traced and the program offers excerpts from Beethoven's Third Symphony. "The Eroica," for the pleasure of viewers and listeners.

Lesson 11 - Music: Emotion and Feeling in Sound

A Brahms symphony (Number One in C) at the beginning of this second program in the study of music is used with telling effect to illustrate that what we hear as music is a putting together of many carefully chosen elements. As Maya Angelou points out, not all sound is music, music is constructed of elements that include pitch, scale (or tuning system), melody, harmony, rhythm, and meter. The "look" of sound is demonstrated by showing waves recorded on an electronic apparatus, and the student "sees" the range of human hearing. In addition to the Brahms symphony, the student hears Beethoven's Appasionata. Mahler's Symphony Number 4 in G, and an electronic composition by Alden Ashworth. In conclusion, Maya Angelou describes the Ashworth composition as "an example of a move from the past that we know to a future that may be."

Lesson 12 - Music: Meaning Through Structure

Through an extensive probing of the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach, this program brings to the student some understanding of the importance of form to music and of the meaning that the artist imparts in his work. Maya Angelou offers insight into the personal life of Bach, whose entire life was bound up with music. A prolific composer, he wrote more than fifty volumes of music, most of them relating in some way to religion. Prolific as he was, Bach was not recognized in his own time; the true worth of his contribution to music was discovered more than 50 years after Bach's death by Felix Mendelssohn. In this program the student hears Bach's music performed upon many different instruments and by several different music groups, including the lute, harpsichord, the flute, and electronic synthesizer, a jazz group, a chamber orchestra, and a dance group.

Lesson 13 - Music: Listening for the Unexpected

Maya Angelou opens this program on criticism (which concludes the study of music) with the opinion that music seems to be the one form of human expression that has withstood the changes of time. She is joined in this program by Los Angeles Times music critic Martin Bernheimer and by Alberto Bolet, music director and conductor of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. The qualifications, responsibilities, and importance of the music critic are debated. Mr. Bernheimer offers the opinion that a critic's first responsibility is to his reader and his second responsibility is to the artist. Mr. Bolet agrees that the critic is something of a mirror of the artist's work. The program concludes with an agreement by all three participants that there can be no other art without music.

Lesson 14 - Literature: From Words Truth

In this first of four lessons on literature, Miss Angelou introduces the topic by noting that the study of literature in this course will be confined to poetry and fiction. Then, the program traces the evolution of that tool essential to written literature: the alphabet, following its development from sketching, to petroglyphs, to symbols. The remainder of the program surveys the characteristics of literature in each of the major periods of Western culture; ancient Greece, Anglo-Saxon England, the Elizabethan Age, the Romantic Age, Neoclassicism, the Eighteenth Century, the Victorian Age, and the twentieth century and its schools of realism and naturalism. The program also notes how the various types of literature have portrayed humankind differently. This survey is highlighted by readings of excerpts from the works of numerous authors and poets and by film that reinforces the images conveyed by the words.

Lesson 15 - Literature: The Synthesis of Poetry

This program centers on the elements of a major literary form - poetry-and on how those elements are fused to create a form that conveys the poet's meaning. The principal elements the program analyzes are rhythm, imagery, repetition, meaning and rhyme. This discussion of poetry is supplemented with readings of a number of poems by Robert Frost, including "The Road Not Taken," "Hushed October," "A Leaf-Treader," "Two Tramps in Mud Time," and "Birches." Students also have the opportunity to hear Miss Angelou recite some of her own poems, including "Harlem Hopscotch," "Song for the Old Ones," "The Senses of Insecurity," "Artful Pose," and "Alone." Miss Angelou also reads Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," William Henley's "Invictus," a Shakespeare sonnet, and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"

Lesson 16 - Literature: The Story Beyond

Miss Angelou opens this program with a definition of good fiction: "a product of the creative arrangement of elements achieved through the selection of materials which the writer has accumulated." After an overview of the history of fiction, from the papyri of ancient Egypt to the present, the program then examines the basic elements of fiction through detailed analysis of one short story: "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. The story told in "The Lottery" is related through film and narrative supplied by Miss Angelou. At appropriate points in the story, Miss Angelou discusses how the author developed the plot and used atmosphere and characterization to convey her meaning through the written word.

Lesson 17 - Literature: Behind the Words

Two practitioners of literary forms - Ann Stanford, poet, and Frederick Shroyer, novelist - discuss with Miss Angelou some of the questions and topics basic to the critical, analytical approach to literature. Among the areas explored in this program are the nature of the creative process; how writers approach their work and receive inspiration; the relationship between truth and fiction; the role of rhythm in poetry; and the reasons for the popularity of certain modern forms of fiction over other works, such as the classics, with perhaps greater literary value. The discussion concludes with a consideration of the features of the short story, "The Lottery," that was the subject for much of the preceding program.

Lesson 18 - Painting: Visions Through the Ages

The program provides students with a fascinating overview of how humans-from diverse cultures and different times-have expressed, in two-dimensional forms, their unique perceptions of the world around them. While Miss. Angelou describes how painting reflects the culture and values of the artist, films show cave-paintings; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman frescoes; Renaissance paintings emphasizing the individuality of the person; the paintings of the personal visions of the modernists. Among artists whose works are shown are Raphael, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, El Greco, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Pisarro, Degas, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kandinsky, and Pollack.

Lesson 19 - Painting: Creating a Point of View

This program explores the major elements of painting: color, light and shadow, line, shape, and perhaps the most critical one, the painter's point of view. The program shows how color can have sensory impact and how light and shadow dramatize color and shapes and heighten their emotional values. Among the artists whose works are shown to illustrate specific points about the elements of painting are Monet, Delacroix, Hopper, Claez, and El Greco.

Lesson 20 - Painting: Rousseau - The Lovely Dream

Examination of what are known as the innocent and poetic works of Henri Rousseau-the "Father of the Natives"-provides the focus for this program on the form and meaning of painting. The program offers a biography of Rousseau as a means of providing students with a framework within which to understand the artist and his works. Particular attention is given to how Rousseau's works were at first scoffed at by critics but later acclaimed, and even after his peers acknowledged his genius he never received wide public recognition for his talents. Numerous paintings by Rousseau are shown, including The Lion of Balfour, The River and Notre Dame, The Barges and Bridges, The Hungry Lion, The Dream, War, and Sleeping Gypsy. The program also includes film of paintings by many of Rousseau's late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century contemporaries: Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Picasso.

Lesson 21 - Painting: "…Things We Have Passed…"

In this program on criticism in painting, Maya Angelou and painter Glen White discuss such topics as the difference between painting and other art forms, how the viewer of a painting should prepare for and approach the experience, and the reasons for many persons' reactions and responses to abstract paintings. Particular attention is paid to abstract painting, and Miss Anmgelou and Mr. White discuss why a painter chooses to portray reality by distorting reality, what a viewer is supposed to perceive in abstract paintings, and why some painters attach such complex, sometimes esoteric, titles on their paintings. Some differences between subject matter and content in a painting are also listed.

Lesson 22 - Sculpture: Mirror of Man's Being

From the Venus of Willendorf, shaped by an anonymous carver around 30,000 B.C. to contemporary light sculpture employing lasers, this program outlines the history of yet another way in which artists express life: sculpture. From this program students will gain an understanding of the many and diverse ways humans have expressed their perceptions through three dimensional forms. Representative works shown include ancient African figures and portrait heads; Amerina masks; Egyptian sculptures and low reliefs; Greek and Roman sculpture, monuments, and portrait busts; the religious sculpture of the Middle Ages; the emerging humanistic sculpture of Renaissance; the dynamic works of the Baroque; and the evolution of modern sculpture, beginning with Rodin's works in the nineteenth century and moving forward to such sculptors as Duchamp and Calder.

Lesson 23 - Sculpture: Elements of Dimension

The elements of sculpture as an art form are studied through and examination of how sculpture has evolved over time. As Miss Angelou states in the beginning of the program, "the best way to understand the relationship of methods, materials, and meaning in sculpture is to trace the progress of sculptural technique as it gradually matured over the centuries." The program first explores the two basic forms of sculpture-relief and monolith-that preceded modern sculpture. The development of relief sculpture is traced and particular attention if given to Ghiberti's doors for the Baptistry of Florence, which are generally considered to mark the beginning of the modern era of sculpture. The evolution of monolithic sculpture is also explained and illustrated with film of such works as ancient Egyptian statues, the lifelike works of Greek sculptors, and Donatello's Gattamelata. Modern sculpture, in which some works are partially or totally executed by a person other than the sculptor, is discussed, with Tony Smith's Die serving as an example

Lesson 24 - Sculpture: Meaning Through the Body's Form

The third program of the unit on sculpture explores the unique ways in which sculpture conveys meaning through three-dimensional form. This exploration focuses on a detailed study of the life and works of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor who so altered the art by conveying so much expression and emotion in his works. Among the many of Rodin's works students will see and hear discussed on this program are Man with the Broken Nose, The Age of Bronze, St. John the Baptist Preaching, Migoon, busts of Camille Claudel, Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, Even After the Fall, The Crouching Woman, The Falling Man, I Am Beautiful, She Who Was the Helmet Maker's Beautiful Wife, The Kiss, Eternal Spring, The Donaide, Pas de Deux, The Cry, and Hand of God. Within the survey of Rodin's works, specific attention is given to the figures he created for the The Gates of Hell.

Lesson 25 - Sculpture: Most Difficult of Arts

Miss Angelou and her two guests, Donna Stein, curator, and Oliver Andrews, sculpture, explore a diversity of critical areas in this program, the last in the unit on sculpture. They discuss personal reactions to minimal sculpture; the roles of the critic in the art of sculpture and the responsibility, if any, of the critic for informing and encouraging the sculptor, whether all sculpture should be accepted as art and whether we must accept everyone who proclaims to be an artist as an artist; where the inner vision of an artist comes from; and whether an artist is motivated by external audience or solely by himself.

Lesson 26 - Architecture: The Evolving Skyline

Architecture in American provides the foundation for this examination of the evolution and history of architecture. American architecture can serve this purpose because America is a nation of immigrants and her architecture developed as a "harmonious blending of nationalities." Thus, in this program, students will see examples of Chinese architecture. Spanish buildings, Renaissance and neo-Baroque styles, and structures influenced by the architecture of ancient Rome. The latter part of the program focuses on how technological advances in construction have contributed to the development of modern architecture. Numerous examples, such as the Lever House and Seagram Building, of how steel frames permit window walls and emphasize the linearity of structures are shown. The program also shows how the use of concrete encourages the design of convilinear buildings.

Lesson 27 - Architecture: From Earth to Sky

Function, soundness of construction, and aesthetic pleasure-the three main elements of architecture-from the basis for this program. As an example of how soundness of design can create aesthetic pleasure, the program shows how sculpture was frequently use a supporting elements in buildings in ancient Greece. The program also shows how purely structural elements, such a flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and domes, were designed to make them aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. After describing the architecture typical of the Renaissance, the program then moves to the modern era, and examines the materials-steel, reinforced concrete, and concrete blocks-that have allowed modern architecture to have its characteristic forms. The principle guiding much of modern architecture-"form follows function"-is explained, and numerous examples of structures based on this principle are shown.

Lesson 28 - Architecture: Meaning in a Poet's Vision

Antoni Gaudi, one of the pioneers in the movement against the rigid lines of traditional architectural forms, is the subject of this program that considers the expression of meaning through form in architecture. Much of the program focuses on the buildings Gaudi designed and the multitude of details incorporated into each structure. Students will see this extensive use of light, color, curves, and expressive undulating surfaces, and learn how these architectural forms expressed his belief in the absolute rightness and fitness of natural shapes and organic structures. Among the buildings shown in detail on the program are Casa Battio, Park Guell, Palacia Guell, Casa Vicens, and Casa Mila

Lesson 29 - Architecture: The Shephard of Space

Bernard Zimmerman, an architect and a designer and master planner, and Paul DeFue, a master builder, are Miss Angelou's guests for a discussion of various aspects of architecture as art. They begin by commenting on whether architecture should be considered an art form and on the related question of why architects are often not thought of as artists. They also discuss the relationship between architecture and people: Does a building influence the people who live or work in it? Should the architect consider the feelings of the people who will occupy the building he or she designs? How much control should the users of architecture have over those who create the architecture? How much responsibility does the architect have for controlling the environment? How much should he or she have?

Lesson 30 - Continuing the Quest for Self

This concluding program offers a review of the art forms studied in the seven units of the telecourse, and reprises the theme of the course: that the arts express life and are the artist's attempt to interpret reality. The importance of the arts to our lives is succinctly expressed by Miss Angelou: "The artist's vision gives us new perspectives on the past as well as our relation to it. Finally, Miss Angelou notes that "life would be meaningless and empty without the contributions of artists and their art."