SPRING 2003 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
THEA 71600/ART 79500/MALS 77300
History of Cinema II
Professor Paula Massood
Monday, 6:30-9:30pm
Room C-419, 3 credits
The course is devoted to intensive analysis of the development of the cinema as a medium and art form throughout the world during the period covered. Many key films representing various technological or artistic innovations are screened and discussed.
The growth of the international film industry, above all of Hollywood, the emergence of representational codes, popular genres, and cinematic canons, and the cinema's impact on society as well as other art forms will be central topics of discussion. Different strategies and theories of historiographic research will be extensively analyzed.
THEA 81500
Cyborgs and The Cinematic Imagination
Professor Peter Hitchcock
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30PM, Room C-419, 3 credits
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 techno-superhumanism or posthumanism, this course will examine key films (and several examples of literature and theory) in order to critically engage the mode of narrativity that cyborg films conjure.
The cyborg is the tale told by technology about progress and human self consciousness that instead gave us the twentieth century. Now that the brave new world of the twenty-first century is upon us it is time to take stock of the science fiction realities of the 'borg and body. The cyborg is a complex integer of how identities are made and made up and therefore it shares something of the technology of film narrative itself (the cyborg identity is always a "special" effect). And wherever identity is at stake, in the clean chrome interface of flesh and technology, there lies politics (of gender, class, transnational space and the future of [the] race). What are the components of cyborg narrativity? Is it an allegory of our nervous and/or world system? Has Hal won afer all?
The course will begin with several definitions of the cyborg which we will consider alongside significant early representations (Shelley's Frankenstein, Lang's Metropolis, and a few salient clips from Bride of Frankenstein). Next, we will analyze the components of early Cold War Cyborgania (Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and its relationship to the cyborg of the nuclear apocalypse (Terminator and its myriad "progenies").
The third topic, the cyborg and capital, could easily be a course in itself, but we will restrict ourselves to the alien and alienation in the Alien series and the trenchant dystopia of muties and replicants in Blade Runner--the touchstone of the cyborganic intellectual--(and its contrast with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Gibson's Neuromancer).
These readings will connect to the no less important problem of engendering the cyborg--a space, in particular, where feminist theory and fiction have been a good deal more radical than most high-profile film narratives (alongside the plethora of significant criticism in this area--Haraway, Balsamo, Wolmark, etc.--we will read at least one feminist sci-fi novel, Russ's The Female Man or Piercy's He, She, and It, for instance). A fifth case study on cyborg narrativity will feature memory and the fate of history (the memory chip/clip as the memorial to the death of Time in Total Recall, but also the time/space reversals of cyborgania in Twelve Monkeys or The Matrix). Finally, we will consider whether AI stands for artificial imagination and whether this sense of artifice might ground rather than universalize cinema in the digital age.
THEA 81500
Captured Bodies, Migrating Spirits: Slavery & Its
Historical Legacy
in the Cinemas of the Americas
Professor Jerry W. Carlson
Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm
Room C-419, 3 credits
Captured Bodies, Migrating Spirits will investigate the ways in which New World slavery and its historical consequences have been represented by the cinema. The course will take a hemispheric approach viewing works from Brazil, Cuba, Martinique, the United States, and elsewhere.
The focus will be a comparative analysis of the storytelling forms used to render the three historical stages common to all slave owning cultures of the Americas. First is the massive plantation system and resistance to it from within and without. Second is the agrarian period following the abolition of slavery. Finally, there is the stage of massive migrations to urban areas and resettlement within industrial economies.
Close analysis of the films will be complemented by attention to the intertwined roles of music, religion, and prose fiction in telling and preserving the same historical knowledge. In addition, the course will examine the works in the critical contexts of the postcolonial theory of writers such as Edouard Glissant (Caribbean Discourse), Antonio Benitez Rojo (The Repeating Island), and Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic).
The films may include Nightjohn (USA), The Last Supper (Cuba), Quilombo (Brazil), and Sugar Cane Alley (Martinique). Prose fiction may include The Kingdom of This World (Cuba), Train Whistle Guitar (USA), and Texaco (Martinique).
THEA 81500/WSCP 81000
Cultural Theory and the Documentary
Professor Alison Griffiths
Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm
Room C-419, 3 credits
This is a lecture course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory. The course is organized around three key topics: the documentary archive and the ethnographic gaze; national identity and documentary aesthetics; and experimental and postcolonial documentary practice.
The course offers students a broad introduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, social class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism.
Films screened in class will encompass the following genres: silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, auteurist documentary, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and mainstream documentary. The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spheres and evoke discourses of "truth," "realism," and "authenticity" through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings.
(List of required & recommened texts available in the Certificate Programs office, Room 5109)
THEA 81600/ART 89500
Seminar in Film Theory
Professor William Boddy
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15pm
Room C-419, 3 credits
This course will provide an overview of classical and contemporary film theory. Writers, whose contributions to the field will be examined, include Eisenstein, Arnheim, Epstein, Balazs, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, and Kracauer, among the earlier figures, and such contemporary theorists as Metz, Mitry, Baudry, Mulvey, Heath, and Carroll.
Questions about the structure and function of the filmic "text," the nature of cinematic representation and film spectatorship raised by various schools of thought, including phenomenology, Marxism, semiology, psychoanalysis, and feminism will be considered.
Although attention is largely on primary theoretical writings, secondary texts and films that help to contextualize specific theories will be used as well.