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| Spring 2010 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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| Film Historiography | |
Film 201 Class Times: This course will investigate of a range of methodologies and approaches
for writing film histories. Each week we will focus on recent examples of
historiography, a specific area of historical investigation (the industry,
spectatorship, genre history, the individual film, the individual
director, the cultural history of a medium, the star system, genre
history, the rise of competing media, etc.), and the various questions
about the practice of film historiography raised by both. At the same
time, this course will provide the opportunity for graduate students to
develop a detailed and nuanced knowledge of film history. Throughout, our
analyses of specific methodologies and approaches will be accompanied by
investigations of available resources, archives, film catalogues and
databases essential for primary and secondary film historical research. We
will also address pertinent issues such as: the place of film analysis in
film histories; the relationship between theory and history; the
significance of biographical information in the study of film directors; Required Books: (Books are available at the ASUC Bookstore or on Amazon.com)
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| The Pencil of Nature (Cross-listed as Rhetoric 250) | |
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Film 240.001 Class Time: Admission to this seminar is by permission of the intstructor. Interested students must attend the first clas meeting. We are used to thinking of the camera as a controlling and even aggressive device: a mechanism for “shooting” and “capturing” the world. And since most cameras require an operator, and it is usually a human hand that picks up the apparatus, points it in a particular direction, makes certain technical adjustments, and clicks the camera button, we often extend or transfer this power to our look. Photography consequently seems another chapter in the history of what Heidegger calls “modern metaphysics”--a history that begins with the cogito, that seeks to establish man as the “relational center” of all that is, and whose “fundamental event” is “the conquest of the world as a picture.” However, photography’s earliest practitioners and viewers had a very different understanding of the medium. They saw it as a new kind of image-making—one whose agent was Nature, whose goal was self-disclosure, and whose intended viewer was man. They also conceptualized this image-making in graphic rather than ocular terms, and stressed the differences between it and their perceptions. Surprisingly, they did not question its veracity, nor did they attempt to resolve the discrepancy between what they saw and what the photograph showed them by doubting their own sensory perceptions. They understood what Descartes was unwilling to grant: both opened onto the same world, the one they inhabited. For a brief time, at least, this world seemed inexhaustible. We will begin this seminar with a careful reading of some early writings about photography. We will then explore some texts by Freud, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Proust, Agee and Sebald that are informed by photography. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of some contemporary artists who work in, or with, photography.
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| Political Modernism and Beyond: Radical Formalism in Avant/Garde Film and New Media. | |
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Film 240.002 Class Time: This seminar will explore the radical aspiration of the political avant-garde in film and new media and the ways what is radical has shifted over the course of the last century. Central to the tenets of an earlier political Modernism is the concept of "praxis," in which theoretical questions of radical form and content are explored within the practice of creative filmmaking. At issue is the commitment to formal experimentation, the invention of new aesthetic forms of representation and new modes of perception that could challenge dominant ideologies and their forms of production. Such a politics contends that cinema's role in the transformation of consciousness necessary for radical social change can only be engaged through equally radical aesthetic practices, "Not to make political films, rather to make films politically," insisted Jean-Luc Godard. In connecting these debates to the present, what does it mean to make politically effective media art in the current moment? In the age of transnational media and "convergence culture," where medium specificity has faded into an overlapping multiplicity of platforms and technologies, do the politics of form matter any longer in the creation of politically effective film and media art? The first part of the seminar traces the history of the major works of the political avant-garde, in which the films themselves can be seen as at once theory and practice. We will look at a range of film, video and performance practices from the North American and European contexts-futurist, underground, structural/materialist, Brechtian/Godardian, feminist, queer, grassroots media as well as from other cultural contexts such as post-colonial and so-called Third Cinema of Latin America, Africa and Asia. At the same time we will read some of the theoretical debates that surround these works that include classic and contemporary writings on the subject. We will go on to look at contemporary work in New Media and other "post-cinema" forms to explore what constitutes radical New Media practice. In what ways does the question of a radical form still apply to contemporary media? Is it any longer possible (or necessary) to make media that challenges dominant forms or even to create a counter hegemonic media culture? What is the relationship of newer practices--video installation, web-based forms such as Second Life, culture jamming, social media, tactical media, media piracy, open source--to these questions of the politics of media form? The specific works and texts to be discussed will be based on the interests and research agendas of seminar members. Seminar members will be expected to lead discussions on selected texts and to make a presentation of a final project to the group. Final projects may take the form of a research paper or an artwork that is at once theory and practice. Possible film and media artists include: Vertov, Godard, Rainer, Straub/Hulliet, Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, Helka Sander, Chantal Akerman, Sara Gomez, Abderhamane Sissako, Newsreel, Black Audio Film Collective, Isaac Julian, Jane and Louise Wilson, Walid Ra'ad, Kamal Aljafari, Omer Fast, Daniel Eisenberg, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Raul Peck, Jia Zhangke, Errol Morris. Possible theoretical writings include: Adorno, and Lukacs, Benjamin and Brecht, Gidal, Mulvey/Wollen, Garcia Espinosa to the more contemporary Ranciere, Deleuze, Jameson, Mercer, Galloway, Chun, Holmes, Critical Art Ensemble, Bordowitz, Sholette.
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| Experimental Film and Video | |
Film 240.003 Class Times: Description forthcoming
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| Melodrama and “Excess" (Cross-Listed as Rhetoric 243) | |
FIlm 240.004 Class Times: Whether as theater, film or literature, melodrama has a bad reputation. Its triad of villain, victim and hero, its moral binaries of good and evil, its typical liberal sentimentalism have been insistently reviled ever since the term came into use in the late eighteenth century. To make matters even worse, melodrama, in the U.S. at least, has been associated with feminized suffering and “women’s weepies.” Reviled as morally facile, excessive, and feminine, melodrama is nevertheless the dominant mode of representation in American life and the key, I have argued, to understanding many of the most prominent features of our popular culture and politics. Melodrama’s central narrative of injury and retribution gives shape to a wide range of political projects--from abolitionism, to white supremacy to the reason for invading Iraq. This class will develop a historical and theoretical framework for studying melodrama as a pervasive national, cultural, and political form. As a Film Studies seminar, our concentration will be on American film (early works, the silent blockbuster, so-called classic women’s films) but we will also examine early theatrical examples from the French and American stage, political speeches and television news. We will start from the evolution of early film melodrama out of popular theater, opera and pictorial traditions and trace the conventions of the mode as they change throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first century. Since some of my own work has been focused on racial melodrama we will spend a couple of weeks on that. I invite students interested in other “excessive” media forms--for example, pornography or horror--to join this seminar, as I believe the central issue of the perception of “excess” is similar in all three forms. Requirements: The main project of this course is a 20-page seminar paper on some aspect of melodrama in American, or another, culture. There will also be assigned reactions to particular readings to be shared with the class and reports on further reading. Formal individual presentation of final papers in a late-semester conference will also be required. Required books:
Recommended books: Judith Butler, Precarious Life, Rick Altman, Film/Genre, Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, Versions of Experience.
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