COMD 513 Film and Genre (FALL 2009)
Class Hours: Wednesday 13.40-16.30 (FF115)
Office Hours: Thursday 13.30 - 16.00 [Office: FF117, Tel: 290 1749)
The Course:
This course aims to investigate the key terms of film theory such as narrative, mise-en-scene, subjectivity, the gaze, the voice, spectatorship, sexual difference, suture and so forth in relation to the question of "genre." Selections from various film genres will be examined. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course is about developing the questions that guide film studies research.
Requirements and Assessment:
1. Attendance and Participation: (includes reading texts for discussion before class, participation to discussions, attending screenings and class) [10 %).
2. Weekly responses and comments: An online diary of your reflections and critical thoughts on course materials in the form of individual blog entries or responses. A minimum of 6 • entries over the course of the term (This is the minimum. In fact, you are encouraged to contribute more often). These entries (400-800 words) must be submitted not later than the related reading week. For this, you have to registered with the wordpress and log in as contributor (40 %).
4. Final paper: Addressing a specific topic selected by you and discussed with the instructor (50 %)
Readings:
All the assigned articles are included in the course pack. There are also some recommended
texts:
Timothy Corrigan. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. New York: Longman, 1997.
Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland. Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. London: Arnold, 2002.
John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, Eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Eds. Film and Theory: An Anthology. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.
Graeme Turner, ed., The Film Cultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2002.
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams eds. Reinventing Film Studies. New York: Arnold, 2000.
Schedule
Week 1: Introduction (September 22)
Course agenda and procedures.
Screening:
Verites etmensonges (Orson Welles, 1973)
Week 2: Narrative: Mind-Game Films (September 29)
Staiger, Janet. "Complex narratives, an introduction." Film Criticism, 31:1/2, 2-4. Elsaesser, Thomas. "The Mind-Game Films," in Warren Buckland (ed.). Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, 13-37.
Week 3: Style (October 6)
Buckland, Warren. "Mise-en-scene criticism and statistical style analysis (The English
Patient)", SCAF, 80-116. Bordwell, David. "A Stylish Style" [Intensified Continuity], in The Way Hollywood Tells It:
Story and Style in Modern Movies, 117-157.
Week 4: 'Reading' Film (October 13)
King, Noel. "Hermeneutics, Reception Aesthetics and Film Interpretation," in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 212-23.
Daney, Serge. 'The Tracking Shot in Kapo," trans. Laurent Kretzschmar, Senses of Cinema 30, January-March, 2004.
Screening:
Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1955)
Week 5: Histories of cinema (October 20)
Casetti, Francesco. "History, Histories, Historiography," in Theories of Cinema, 1945-1995,
289-313. Ranciere, Jacques. "A Fable without a Moral: Godard, Cinema, (Histories," in Film Fables,
171-188. Screening: Histoire(s) du cinema: line Histoire seule [Chapter 1(b)] (Jean Luc Godard, 1989,42 min.)
Week 6: Film and Philosophy (October 27)
Alain Badiou, "Cinema as a Democratic Emblem," Parrhesia 6 (2009), 1-6. Deleuze, Gilles. "Thought and Cinema," in Cinema 2: The Time Image, 156-188.
Week 7: Film(ic) bodies (November 3)
Deleuze, Gilles. "Cinema, Body and Brain, Thought", in Cinema 2: The Time Image, 189-224. MacDougall, David. "The Body in Cinema," in The Corporeal Image: film, ethnography, and
the senses, 13-31. Screening: Hunger (Steve Mc Queen, 2008)
Week 8: Film Memory (November 10)
Deleuze, Gilles. "Peaks of present and sheets of time," in Cinema 2: The Time Image, 98-125.
Elsaesser, Thomas. "Postmodernism as mourning work," in Screen 42:2 (Summer 2001).
Screening:
Vals Im Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
Week 9: Ethical Turn (November 24)
Jacques Rancierre, "Ethical Turn," Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006), 1-10. Thomas Elsaesser, "Ethical Calculus: The cross-cultural dilemmas and moral burdens of Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven," Film Comment, May/June 2008.
Screening:
Dogville [Lars von Trier, 2003], Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003], Shoah [Claude
Lanzmann, 1985)
Week 10: Film Nation (December 1)
Thomas Elsaesser. "ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries," in European
Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005, 57-81. Stam and Shohat, "Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the 'Posts'" (RFS, 381-401)
Week 11: The Screen Experience (December 8)
Casetti, Francesco. "Filmic Experience," Screen 50:1 (Spring 2009), 56-66.
Beugnet, Martine and Elizabeth Ezra. "A Portrait of the twenty-first century," Screen 50:1
(Spring 2009), 77-85. Screening: Zidane, un portrait du 21esiecle (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, 2006)
Week 12: Fiction/Non-fiction (December 15)
Sobchack, Vivian. "Towards a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience," in Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, 241-54.
Nichols, Bill. "Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Location: An Evocation," in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, 1-16.
Screening:
Sanssoleil (Chris Marker, 1983); Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005).
Week 13: Film Theory Reconsidered (December 22)
Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image", "The Myth of Total Cinema". Buckland, Warren "Realism in the photographic and digital image [Jurassic Park and The Lost World]," SCAF, 195-219.
Week 14: Overview (December 29)