FSCP 81000 – Captured Bodies, Migrating Spirits: Slavery & Its Historical Legacy in the Cinemas of the Americas – Professor Jerry Carlson, Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [91697]  Cross listed with ART 89500

The course 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 extensive plantation system and resistance to it from within and without. Second is the unstable agrarian period following the abolition of slavery.

Finally, what follows are the massive migrations to urban industrial economies. Close analysis of the films will be complemented by attention to the roles played by music, religion, and prose fiction in telling and preserving the same historical knowledge.

How do musical forms such as the American blues, the Cuban son, and the Brazilian samba sing history?

In what ways do Afro-Atlantic religions such as Haitian vodou, Cuban Santeria, and Brazilian candomble interpret the African presence in the Americas?

And how do the oral cultures of peoples long denied access to literacy find their voices in the written literatures of the 20^th century?

These questions and others will contribute to our understandings of the films and their allied forms of cultural production.

The course seeks both to identify commonalities among the cinematic forms and arts of peoples of African descent in the New World and to make distinctions among local cultures and their particular expressive forms. To do so, the course draws from the diverse theoretical perspectives offered by writers such as Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic), Antonio Benitez Rojo (The Repeating Island), and Edouard Glissant (Caribbean Discourse), among others.

Students are expected to attend all classes and screenings. All absences must be explained to the professor by email. As for requirements, students will write a brief (5-7 page) analytical essay and a longer (15-20 page) research paper. Details of the assignments will be discussed in class.

Syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).

This course will focus on the complex artistic and ideological relationships between selected films and theoretical writings by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov and many central cultural monuments and spectacles in the Soviet Union during the first decade after the revolution.

Films to be analyzed in detail will include the following: Eisenstein's Strike [1924-5], October [1927-8], and The General Line (Old and New) [1928]; Pudovkin's Mother [1926] and The End of St. Petersburg [1927]; and Vertov's Kino Glaz [1924], One Sixth of the World [1926], The Eleventh Year [1928], The Man with a Movie Camera [1929] and Enthusiasm [1931].

These works will be examined in the light of aesthetic debates among the Constructivists and Productivists, including Rodchenko, Gan, Arvatov, the Vesnin Brothers, the Stenberg Brothers, Malevich and Tatlin in the visual arts, as well as literary and theatrical artists and critics such as Trotsky, Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Tretyakov, Mayakovsky, and Meyerhold.

Readings will include primary texts by all of the names mentioned, as well as select secondary sources.

After some orienting lectures, the course will be conducted as a seminar with a presentation and term paper required.

Draft syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).

FSCP 81000 – African Cinema, North & South Professor Peter Hitchcock, Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [91701] Cross listed with THEA 81500 & ART 89500  COURSE CANCELLED

This course surveys the history of the horror film, from its roots in the gothic novel to its more recent manifestations in the slasher film and the new Japanese, Korean, and Thai ghost films.

We will consider issues of gender and spectatorship by drawing on Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws and Barry Keith Grant’s The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film.

The horror film’s critique of the ideology of the family will be discussed via Robin Wood’s writings, and the issue of fandom will be examined by drawing on Matt Hill’s The Pleasures of Horror.

The class will also examine industrial and economic forces that have shaped the horror film such as the fall of the studio system and the rise of gimmicks such as 3D; to this end students will read Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror films and the American Movie Business 1953-1968.

Finally, a key goal of the class will be to examine the issue of taste and the horror film’s simultaneous status as "trash" and "art," the relationship between cult and camp, and the high/low aesthetic of Italian giallo films. For this part of the class we will read excerpts from Joan Hawkins’ Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde as well as: Jeff Sconce’s "‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style"; Susan Sontag’s "Notes on Camp"; and Mark Jancovich’s "Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions."

One film will be screened in class each week. For most classes we will discuss two films, and students will be assigned one of the films to view before class. I will also provide a list of recommended films.

Students will complete one major assignment for the class, a 20-25 page research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor.

Each student will meet individually with me one month before the end of the semester to discuss his/her final project, and proposals for the final papers will be due two weeks before the end of the semester. Papers should involve substantial original research and should display both mastery of issues covered in the class and the ability to apply course concepts to the paper topic.

Listing of required and recommended films available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).