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| Fall 2007 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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| Film Historiography | |
Film 201(4 units) 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 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. This course will focus on the first 60 years of (mostly US) film history, during which time our overall focus will be joined by ongoing engagement with questions of race, class, gender and national identities. 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; researching canonical as well as non-canonical films; the importance of industry discourse such as trade periodicals, film catalogues, fan magazines, guidebooks, and reviews; and the relationship between film and other forms of commercialized leisure--such as photography, the wax museum, the illustrated press, stage melodrama, hard-boiled detective fiction, etc. Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (NY: Columbia UP, 1996) Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post-War America (University of Chicago Press, 1992) Catherine Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (University of California Press, 2007) |
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| The Image of Time: Cinematic Temporalities in Theory & Practice | |
Film 240, Section 1(4 units) Weds 4-7pm and additional screening time Tues 7:30pm Looking at time as a material, experiential, political and aesthetic phenomenon, we explore the experience of time in and through a range of artist’s film and video works. We will examine works that use formal strategies such as montage, simultaneity, repetition, duration and virtuality, to explore complex relationships between present, past and future and between history and memory. We will study works that challenge the illusionism of diegetic-time in conventional cine-storytelling to explore the possibilities of the materiality of real-time as a central cinematic element. What kinds of challenges do these kinds of works create for spectatorship? For thought and feeling? How do we approach the experience of being “with” a work of cinema rather than “in” it, as images are allowed to exist and transform in the flow of time? We will contextualize our seminar with several theoretical readings, but emphasis will be placed on the films and videos that are “doing” theory in their own right. Work for the course will be based on individual research needs for which a final scholarly research paper or a visual art work will be required. Image texts to include: Written texts will come from the following: |
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| Comic Interventions: Irony, Parody, Mockumentary (Also Listed under German 214) | |
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Film 240, Section 3 (4 units) This research seminar will combine readings in theories of humor, irony, satire, parody, and pastiche with specific case studies of the comic mode in cinema and other media. Jokes and comedies frequently depict a society and its norms through the "bird's-eye view" of "the stranger" (Georg Simmel). Our focus will be on enactments of ethnic and national identities in multilingual environments. Such representations constitute a stage where communities are forged performatively – and often controversially – through strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Following the work of major theorists of humor, jokes, pastiche, parody, satire, and carnival (including Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mary Douglas, and Richard Dyer), we shall analyze how revolution and control, anarchy and containment, aggression and laughter are closely interrelated in comic acts. Questions of audience and spectatorship will be addressed in relation to jokes and caricatures that verge on the border to offensive stereotyping and hate speech. Special attention will be devoted to mockumentaries such as Mondo Cane (1961), Zelig (1983), Incident at Loch Ness (2004), and Borat (2006), which provoke us to rethink genre conventions of travelogues, ethnographic documentaries, or biopics. Our discussion of spectatorship can also be extended to television material such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as videos circulating on the internet through YouTube or Google Video. The seminar will be based on participants' research interests and the final selection of materials will be determined collaboratively. |
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| Mindless Pleasure: Body Genres and Cinema Modernity | |
Film 240, Section 4 (4 units) Meeting times: class and screenings, Tuesday, 1:00-6:00, Dwinelle 226 This course takes the history of popular cinema’s “mindless pleasures”—from gut-wrenching laughter to spine-tingling thrills—very seriously indeed. By examining the many wildly successful early film genres (animation, slapstick, action and adventure serials, mystery-crime films) too often overlooked by contemporary criticism, we will privilege a history in which canonical accounts of mainstream cinema’s so-called “classical” narrative hegemony and its cognitive/psychological appeal, no longer make sense. Our consideration of alternative aesthetic and narrative models adequate to the task of assessing these films will engage us in materials ranging from the contemporaneous theories of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and Viktor Shlovsky, through contemporary scholarship in related disciplines concerning the histories of the grotesque, the fairy-tale, the novelistic, and the poetics of the avant-garde. At base, we will keep two interrelated questions in mind: what might the study of popular film genres contribute to our understanding of the culture of modernity and, conversely, how might the sociological, philosophical and aesthetic concerns of the period help us elucidate and reframe the history and theory of cinema? In so doing, we will approach modernity as encompassing a whole range of practices and experiences that register, respond to, and reflect upon the processes of modernization, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conception of space and time, the changing implications of selfhood in western culture, and the re-signification of meanings associated with gender and racial identities. Films to be screened include, for example: early trick films; animation shorts starring Little Nemo, Felix the Cat, and Mickey Mouse; the comedic antics of Charlie Chaplin; the grotesqueries of Keystone slapstick; the magical fantasies of Sidney Drew and Ernst Lubitsch; Helen Holmes’ action railway thrillers and D.W. Griffith’s rescue melodramas; the adventure serials associated with Pearl White (U.S) and Fearless Nadia (India); and the mystery-crime conundrums posed by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang. |
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