This graduate seminar introduces central issues in film studies. Students familiar and unfamiliar with the discipline alike are invited to think how core questions can expand scholarly research and public interest. The seminar pays attention to writing strategies, as practiced by the scholars we read and by the seminar participants. Students will write a weekly 2-page response to the readings as well as a 4-page close reading of a film scene on most weeks.
TENTATIVE SYLLABUS (will be modifies in consultation with the seminar participants)
1. Ontology:
Bazin, “Le Journal d’un cure de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson”
Mulvey, “Passing Time: Reflections on Cinema from a New Technological Age”
Film: Diary of a Country Priest
2. Material history / history of ideas:
Kaes, “Tales from the Asylum”
Amad, “The Counter-Archive of Cinematic Memory: Bergsonism, la Durée, and the Everyday”
Films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
3. Vernacular modernism:
Hansen, “Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism”
Zhang, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, and Laborer’s Love”
Films: Laborer’s Love, Daybreak
4. Audiences:
Snead, “Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look”
Stewart, “’Negroes Laughing at Themselves’? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity”
Klinger, “The Contemporary Cinephile: Film Collecting after the VCR”
Film: King Kong
5. Phenomenology / cinephilia:
Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh”
Sperb, “Sensing an Intellectual Nemesis”
Film: The Piano
6. Trauma:
Felman, “In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah”
Film: Shoah (part I)
7. Genre:
Altman, ”What is Generally Understood by the Notion of Film Genre?”
Gillespie, “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything): Deep Cover and Modalities of Noir Blackness”
Film: Deep Cover
8. Apparatus / gaze:
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Braester, “Cinephiliac Engagement and the Disengaged Gaze in In the Mood for Love“
Film: In the Mood for Love
9. The dispositif:
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”
Bao, “A Culture of Resonance: Hypnotism, Wireless Cinema, and the Invention of Intermedial Spectatorship”
Film: Goodbye, Dragon Inn!
10. Circulation / nation / festivals:
Yoshimoto, “A Future of Comparative Film Studies”
“Venice to Go: Cultural In/Difference and the Digital Ecology of Film”
Films: The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven
Media Archaeology:
“(Un)walking at the Fair: About Mobile Visualities at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900”
Casetti, “Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age”
Films: Artaud Double Bill; Jeanne D’arc