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COURSES
SPRING 2010
FSCP 81000 – Film History II – Professor
William Boddy, [10246] Thursday, 11:45am-3:15pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
Cross listed with ART 79500, MALS 77300, & THEA
71600
Course Description: This course
will explore major developments in US and global film culture from the
introduction of sound to the advent of the “blockbuster” era in Hollywood in
the mid-1970s.
We will analyze works from a number of national cinemas, artistic movements,
and creative auteurs, including Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks,
Roberto Rossellini, Abe Polonksy, Jean-Luc Godard, and Martin Scorsese.
Topics addressed include the problem of film authorship, the development of film
genres and aesthetic styles, and the relationship of the classical Hollywood
studio system to alternative models of film production in the United States
and elsewhere. Emphasis will be placed
on the historical, aesthetic, and ideological contexts of the films examined.
Required Text: David Cook, A
History of Narrative Film fourth edition (New York: Norton, 2004)
Course Requirements: In
addition to participation in seminar discussion, each student will prepare
brief response papers to the films and readings each week, and will write a
15-18 page research paper on a topic approved by the instructor.
Topics and tentative screenings:
Early sound film: M/Blue Angel; Hollywood
genre film of the 1930s: Scarface,
Bringing Up Baby
Inter-War political documentary: Land
Without Bread, Spanish Earth
French poetic realism: Crime of M.
Lange, Rules of the Game
Neorealism: Rome, Open City
Hollywood melodrama: Written on the
Wind
Hollywood Noir: Big Combo/Out of the Past/Touch of Evil/Gun Crazy/Detour/Big
Heat/Criss Cross/Force of Evil
Hollywood Western: Man from Laramie/Ranch Notorious/Johnny Guitar
French New Wave: Breathless, A
Married Woman/Two or Three Things/Hiroshima Mon Amour/Night and Fog
Cinema Novo: Antonio das Mortes
European art cinema: Red
Desert/Blow Up/Innocence Unprotected
New German Cinema: American Friend/Maria Braun
New Hollywood: Chinatown/Mean Streets/Badlands/Night Moves
US avant-garde film: Meshes of the
Afternoon, Scorpio Rising/Riddle of Lumen
FSCP 81000 –Seminar in Film Theory – Professor
David Gerstner, [10247] Tuesday, 11:45am-3:45pm, Room C-419, 3 credits Cross
listed with ART 89444 & THEA 81600
This course explores the ways in which
filmmakers and scholars theorize the issues of film form and content.
Since the advent of the cinema in the late
nineteenth century, a great deal has been written about it in terms of its
aesthetic properties as well as its political-ideological possibilities.
Through close readings of both the films and writings of major theorists
(many who make film) we will consider what is at stake (aesthetically and
politically) in the production of film.
Readings may include: Bazin, Eisenstein, Münsterberg. Hartmann, Arnheim,
Panofsky, Kracauer, Benjamin, Metz, Mulvey, Doane, Gunning, Bergstrom,
Wollen, Deleuze, Godard, Vertov,
Sobchack, J. Stewart, L. Williams, Modeleski as well as selected writings
from Cahiers du Cinèma, Movie, and Tel Quel.
Students are expected to complete weekly writing assignments, deliver a
presentation, and complete a 15-20 page paper.
FSCP
81000–Cinema and Madness –
Professor Edward Miller, [10248] Tuesday, 4:15-8:15 pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
Cross listed with ART 89600 & THEA
81500
With its fixation on the illogic of dream sequences
and unlikely juxtapositions, cinema has long succumbed to the allure of
madness, perhaps most notably in the works of Hitchcock, Lang, Bergman,
Cronenberg, and Lynch.
This course investigates the relationship between film and madness, charting
a theoretical history. Following Foucault in Madness and Civilization and
Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia the
course takes an anti-psychiatric stance toward madness, viewing it as a
description with political and historical dimensions, rather than an
affliction of singular, flawed psyches.
In addition we provide counter-readings of some of the most famous case
studies in psychoanalysis, such as the memoirs of Judge Schreber (misread by
Freud as the rantings of a paranoid homosexual) and the fantasies of
schizophrenics as described by Victor Tausk.
The course pays particular attention to three disparate contemporary artists
whose work is informed by expressions of madness: Guy Maddin, Zoe Beloff, and
Ryan Trecartin. Guy Maddin revisits silent cinema and German expressionism in
order to infuse his films with displays of aberrant psycho-sexual behavior.
Zoe Beloff mines film and psychiatric history in order to re-stage the
spectre of female spiritualists and hysterics (and patients), often using 3-D
in order to lend her films both depth and ghostliness. Ryan Trecartin uses
postproduction techniques to show the madness of the digital everyday, one in
which his characters change names, voices, genders, and appearances with the
ease of a double-clicked computer mouse. Trecartin and Beloff will be invited
to present their work.
Other films viewed in the course include: Lynch’s Inland Empire
(2006), Hobb’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (2006), Van Sant’s Last
Days (2005), Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), Coppola’s The
Conversation (1974), Cassavetes’ A
Women Under the Influence (1974), Polanski’s Repulsion
(1965), Litvak’s The Snake Pit
(1948), Deren’s Meshes of an Afternoon (1943), Lang’s The Testament
of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Dreyer’s La Pasion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928),
and Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926).
The key text of the course is Patrick Fuery’s Madness and Cinema
(2003). We also read selections from Giorgio Agamben (“Notes on Gesture”),
Stephen Heath (“The Cinematic Apparatus”), Jacques Lacan (from The
Psychoses), Slavoj Žižek (from Enjoy Your Symptom), Joan Copjec (“The Anxiety of the
Inflencing Machine”), Jacques Derrida (“Cogito and the History of Madness”),
Fredrich Kittler (from Gramophone Film Typewriter), Kaja Silverman
(from The Acoustic Mirror), Vicky Lebeau (from Psychoanalysis and
Cinema: The Play of Shadows), and Fleming and Manvell (from Images of
Madness).
A paper proposal is due just before the middle of the semester. Research
papers are 15-20 pages and the final session of class is structured like a
conference in which students both present their work as well as serve as
moderators and respondents.
FSCP 81000 – The Cyborg Effect/Affect – Professor Peter Hitchcock, [10249] Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm, Room C-419, 3
credits Cross listed with ART 89600 & THEA 81500
Science fiction film and literature have
conventionally explored the theme of what makes a human human. The cyborg builds and bends such
conventions by denoting that contestable terrain between the human subject
and technoscience.
Much cyborg culture wants to present this space as liminal and liberating--as
a fantasy that is indeed simply representable. Yet when that assumption is made the
outcome is either deeply conservative or conventional in the negative
sense.
Rather than explore cyborgian space as a simple opposition between humanism
and posthumanism, this course will examine key films, literature and theory
in order to engage critically the mode of narrativity cyborg films
conjure.
One recurrent theme will be to analyze the production of cyborgian special
effects in contradistinction to the more complex (non) representational
aesthetics of affect. This will
require consideration of major affect theories, particularly those of Spinoza
and Tomkins.
In addition, I would also want to trace the genealogy of cyborg and labor
through the figure and figuration of automata and what I am calling automata
affect, in which the body becomes technologized and dispersed in circuits,
systems and networks. The latter
approach proves particularly provocative in the study of cyborg anime.
For many critics the cyborg has always been a symptom of the cinematic
apparatus itself, the techné, as it were, of the “kino eye.” The tendency, however, has been to collapse
its utopian aspects into modernity’s promise rather than to explore the
collocation of ‘borg and body as modernity’s question or pause.
A tension exists between the cyborg as bodily extension and as fearfully
bodiless affect. This is not simply an
endgame of humanist discourse (the resolution of affect in favor of the body)
but an impasse in the logic of capital and cinema. The conceptual arena of the cyborg
therefore becomes a struggle not just over modernity’s futures but also over
the persistence of cinema itself within this trajectory.
By exploring different aspects of cyborg effect/affect this course aims not
only to provide an introduction to the importance of the cyborg in cinema but
also to facilitate a greater understanding of the interaction/interface of
the body and technology in general.
Course Requirements: a class presentation and a 20-25 page final paper. It is hoped the class presentation may
provide a research base for the term paper.
Supplementary visual submissions are encouraged.
Individual essays in the course material will be uploaded to library
reserves.
For the most part, films will be seen outside of class time although clips
will be used extensively.
Reading and screening list available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room
5109).
FSCP 81000 – The Western Gaze– Professor
Marc Dolan, [10250] Friday, 11:45am–2:45pm, Room C-419, 3 credits Cross
listed with ART 89600, ASCP 81500, & THEA 81500
This course will examine the rise, fall, and
perhaps second rise of one of the most popular American narrative genres of
the 20th century: the Western.
The course will begin with an examination of the parallel development during
the nineteenth century of the Western as a visual genre in landscape painting
and as a narrative genre in popular fiction.
These two nineteenth-century traditions both influenced early silent
film in the U.S., as the American film industry moved to California from the
East Coast and the West became more a site of myth than honest memory.
In studying what followed this transition, central consideration will
obviously be given to the genre’s (re-)construction of both American manhood
and American foreign policy, but we will also give consideration to the
Western as a purely aesthetic genre—particularly in relation to landscape,
where one may speak in both media of something like a “Western gaze.”
To encourage this more aesthetic approach, specific assignments and class
sessions will be structured around shooting locations. We will begin with a session on New York
and New Jersey (the original West of American cinema), then move to the
then-fresh California settings of such early independent efforts as The
Squaw Man and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch), then to such favored
silent settings as Newhall (Hell’s Hinges) and Chatsworth (The Iron
Horse).
A session on the backlot-focused Westerns of the early sound era will also
focus on the Western musical (Destry Rides Again and Roy Rogers’ Utah).
Next we will turn to the postwar return to location shooting, in angsty
Tuscon (Winchester ‘73/Red River/3:10 to Yuma) and
sparsely peopled Moab (My Darling Clementine/Once upon a Time in
the West).
After a brief consideration of the late 60s vogue for antiheroic Durango (Butch
Cassisy & the Sundance Kid/The Wild Bunch), we will consider
the so-called anti-Westerns of the post-Vietnam era, so many of them shot in
the presumptively elegiac Northwest, including Oregon (Paint Your Wagon/Dead
Man) and Montana (Heaven’s Gate/The Ballad of Little Jo),
even British Columbia (McCabe and Mrs. Miller/The Grey Fox) and
Alberta (Unforgiven).
Readings will be drawn from: John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique; David
Lusted, The Western; Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western
Film; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; and Janet Walker, ed., Westerns:
Films through History.
There are three requirements for this course: (1) active participation in
discussions, including periodic reports on individualized viewing
assignments; (2) a brief presentation of original scholarship on some aspect
of the Western that we have not considered in depth in this course, to be
given late in the semester and (3) a 20-25-page seminar paper that treats
that original scholarship in greater detail.
Tentative
List of Film Studies Courses, Fall 2010-Spring 2011
To
come
PAST COURSES:
Fall 2009;Spring
2009;Fall 2008; Spring
2008;Fall 2007;Spring
2007;Fall 2006;Spring 2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005; Fall 2004; Spring 2004: Fall 2003;Spring 2003;
Fall 2002; Spring 2002;
Fall 2001; Spring 2001;Fall 2000;Spring 2000; Fall 1999; Spring 1999; Fall 1998
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