Enrollment limited to 20, no permits, non-matrics, or auditors.

FSCP 81000 – Holocaust Memories: Films, Monuments, Museums, Professor Stuart Liebman, Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419, 3 credits

This course will focus on cinematic treatments of the Holocaust as well as on the complex issues surrounding the representation of this unprecedented historical event. Readings will include poems, memoirs, theoretical texts, and novels as well as historiographic and philosophical reflections about the Holocaust.

We will also devote time to reflections about Holocaust memorial monuments and museums, as well as about the way Holocaust memories are conveyed in other visual art forms (Christian Boltanski, among others).

Questions to be addressed include: What roles have films and other works of visual art played in shaping public awareness of the Holocaust? How have films, monuments and museums about the Holocaust and their public reception changed over time in different countries, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe where most of the slaughter actually took place, and where the vicissitudes of the Cold War and its aftermath have dramatically impacted the political, social and moral meanings of World War II? To what extent has cinematic "kitsch" and the voyeurism of uninformed audiences around the world adulterated public memory of the Holocaust?

BOOKS TO BE READ:

Lucy Dawidowicz. The War Against the Jews (Bantam); Primo Levi. The Drowned and the Saved (Summit Books); Primo Levi. Survival in Auschwitz (HarperCollins); Cynthia Ozick. The Shawl (Vintage); Elie Wiesel. Night (Bantam).

Syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).

—Frankenstein (Whale,1931) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene,1920)
Recommended: The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale,1935) and Dracula (Browning,1931)

—The Thing from Another World (Nyby/Hawks,1951) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold,1954)

—Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel,1956)
Recommended: It Came from Outer Space (Arnold,1953)

—Cat People (Tourneur,1942) and The Wasp Woman (Corman, 1959)
Recommended: Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)

—God Told Me To (Cohen, 1976) and The Exorcist (Friedken,1973)

—Night of the Living Dead (Romero,1968) and Dawn of the Dead (Romero,1978) Recommended: Shaun of the Dead (Wright,2004)

—Last House on the Left (Craven,1972)
Recommended: The Virgin Spring (Bergman,1960) and I Spit on Your Grave (Zarchi,1978)

—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper,1974) and The Stepfather (Ruben,1987)
Recommended: The Hills Have Eyes (Craven,1977)

—Halloween (Carpenter,1978)
Recommended: The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones,1982) and Friday the 13^th (Cunningham, 1980)

—The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979) and Carrie (DePalma,1977)
Recommended: Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975) and Videodrome (Cronenberg,1983)

—Opera (Argento,1987) and Deep Red (Argento,1976)
Recommended: Suspiria (Argento,1977) and Don’t Look Now (Roeg,1973)

—The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Fuest,1971) and Lair of the White Worm (Russell,1988)
Recommended: Dead Alive (Jackson,1992) and Evil Dead II (Raimi,1987)

FSCP 81000/ASCP 82000 –Film and American Culture in the 1950s: Genre and Politics, Professor Morris Dickstein Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419, 3 credits

In recent years the 1950s has emerged as one of the most fascinating decades in the history of the twentieth century and in film history. Once stereotyped either as golden age of home and family or a swamp of conformism, repression, and anti-Communist hysteria, the period is now seen as a much more complex and transitional era.

This course will examine the cross-currents of politics and culture in the 1950s by focusing on key American films and film genres, including musicals, westerns, films noirs, sci-fi, horror, women’s films, thrillers, and socially conscious dramas about race, troubled youth, the cold war, and other issues.

With the help of some key books of the period, such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Organization Man, as well as some sidelong glances at key television programs, the course will explore the social and aesthetic context of these films.

Topics of discussion will include the cold war, the debate over McCarthyism and conformity, the changes in Hollywood (including the blacklist), the decay of cities, concerns about organized crime and juvenile delinquency, the effects of affluence and suburbanization, the conflicts over race, the rise of consumer culture and of new forms of mass communication, the generation gap, and the changes in American values that led to the 1960s, including the beginnings of the counterculture.

The course will try to define the moral and intellectual climate of the postwar era as seen through its films. The films screened will include such works as Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rebel Without a Cause, The Thing, The Searchers, Bend of the River, Pickup on South Street, Forbidden Planet, The Defiant Ones, The Big Heat, Written on the Wind, and The Sweet Smell of Success.

The structure of the course will be comparative and cumulative. Each film will be linked with another film or book on a similar theme, to be seen or read in preparation for the class.

Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a research paper. Secondary works will include books like Peter Biskind’s Seeing Is Believing and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

FSCP 81000 --Spectacular Realities: Immersion and Interactivity In Film and Related Arts, Professor Alison Griffiths, Thursday, 6:30-9:00pm, Room C419, 3 credits

This course offers an interdisciplinary investigation of diverse forms of spectacular image-making, from Medieval cathedrals to contemporary Imax films. A fundamental premise of the course is that a fascination with hyper-illusionist and immersive ways of seeing the world have long pre-dated their contemporary incarnations in digital and electronic media.

There has been a persistent fascination with large-scale representations that present the possibility of immersion, interactivity, and in some instances, three-dimensional encounters with the world (including the eighteenth-century circular panorama and its various spin-offs), and audiences have long enjoyed the perceptual play between real and unreal endemic to these spectacular representations. This course offers a genealogical study of these spectacular realities, drawing upon theories of visuality and cultural history to enable students to make intellectual connections between old and new media.

For example, a unit on Medieval cathedrals and tapestries will explore the theoretical ramifications of the "revered gaze"; we will consider the spectatorial and iconographical correspondences across representations of Christ’s Passion from the Middle Ages, late nineteenth century panoramas, and contemporary Hollywood cinema. In addition, by identifying some of the enduring features of panoramas, Imax films and 360 degree Internet technologies, students will gain a more sophisticated understanding of how these phenomena have been promoted for their respective audiences, including the strikingly similar rhetorical claims made about each form.

Working from the premise that there may be little essentially "new" about "new media," especially with regards to the discursive construction of the experience on offer, students will be encouraged to explore associations across historical periods and disciplinary boundaries, to think creatively about ways in which new media reinvent old phenomena and phantasmatic desires. Exhibition practices will also be explored, since the architectural forms of the specific venues of such spectacular image-making, including cathedrals, stately homes, rotundas, planetariums, museums, and world’s fairs, play a central role in constructing the experience for the spectator.

Students will explore a rich range of visual and reading materials, of special interest to students interested in film and new media, pre-cinema, Art History, Theatre, and English. Organized both conceptually and chronologically, the course begins with a theoretical overview of critical approaches to theories of spectacle, visuality, and immersion, considering the works of Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Arnheim, Guy Debord, David Freedberg, Oliver Grau, Barbara Maria Stafford, Hal Foster, Chris Jenks, Lisa Cartwright, Tom Gunning, Anne Freedberg, Vanessa Schwartz, and Paul Virilio.

The course will involve in a process of accretion, first examining pre-twentieth century spectacle-making, including gothic cathedrals, medieval tapestries, frescoes, dioramas, panoramas (both circular and moving), waxworks, planetariums, and natural history dioramas, before looking more closely at the relationship between moving images and exhibition contexts, such as the world’s fair, museum of natural history, amusement park, and the Internet.

In addition to slides, screenings include Film Before Film, a selection of early cinema (pre-1907) nonfiction subjects from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, in particular reenactments and panoramas, The World on Display (on the 1904 St Louis exposition) and The World of Tomorrow (on the 1939 New York World’s Fair), To Fly, Across the Sea of Time, Everest, The Matrix, Minority Report, and The Reality Trip.

Students will also undertake several fieldtrips: to the American Museum of Natural History’s planetarium show Passport to the Universe, Sonic Vision, a digitally animated alternative music show, and the newly refurbished hi-tech Hall of Ocean Life; to the Sony Imax Theater; and to a retail/commercial environment of their choice where moving images, interactive exhibits, and immersive sound-scapes define the experience.

Students will write two short critical response papers to assigned readings, a mid-term assignment organized around one of the field-trips, and a fifteen page research paper devised in close consultation with the professor.