Week 1 – 11 SEPT – Introduction
Week 2 – 18 SEPT – Cinema Studies in North America to 1960: New Exploration of Early Paradigms
Required reading:
Dana Polan. “Introduction.” Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007.
Dana Polan. “North America.” SAGE. 9-24.
Haidee Wasson. “Making Cinema A Modern Art,” and “Rearguard Exhibition: The Film Library’s Circulating Programs.” Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005.
Suggested Reading:
Ian Aitken. “European Film Scholarship.” SAGE. 25-53.
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Paola Voci. “China: Cinema, Politics and Scholarship.” SAGE. 54-73.
Ismail Xavier. “Cinema Studies in Brazil. ” SAGE. 95-100.
Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams. “Australia.” SAGE. 112-122.
Week 3 – 25 SEPT – Cinema And Cultural Theory I – David Bordwell v Slavoj Zizek: Interpretation, and “Post Theory”
Required reading:
David Bordwell. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
David Bordwell. “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory.” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. 3-36. (Presenter: Ellen Vincer)
Slavoj Zizek. “Introduction: The Strange Case of the Missing Lacanians,” and “Universality and Its Exception.” The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory. London:BFI, 2001. 1-30. (Presenter: Yi Cui)
Suggested Reading:
Murray Smith. “Film and Philosophy.” SAGE. 147-163.
Hamish Ford. “Difficult Relations: Film Studies and Continental European Philosophy.” SAGE. 164-179.
Jane Gaines. “Cinema/Ideology/Society: The Political Expectations of Film Theory.” SAGE. 361-375.
Week 4 – 2 OCT – Cinema And Cultural Theory II – Realism Reconsidered: Time, Moments and Drift – Bazin and Deleuze
Required reading:
André Bazin. “Ontology of the Photographic Image”; “Charlie Chaplin”; “Films of Exploration”; “Marginal Notes on Eroticism.” What is Cinema? Vols. 1 & 2. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967-71. (Presenter: Sara Swain)
André Bazin. “Death Every Afternoon” Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Ed. Ivone Margulies. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 27-32.
Serge Daney. “The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals).” Rites. 32-41.
Philip Rosen. “History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in Bazin.” Rites 42-79.
Mary-Ann Doane. “The Object of Theory.” Rites. 80-92.
Gilles Deleuze. Excerpts from Cinema 2: The Time Image. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Suggested Reading:
George Kouvaros. “’We Do Not Die Twice’: Realism and Cinema.” SAGE. 376-390.
NO CLASS 9 OCT – Yom Kippur
Week 5 – 16 OCT – Cinema And Cultural Theory III – Identity Politics in the Age of Animation – Rancière and Deleuze
Required reading:
Jacques Rancière. The Future of theImage. London: Verso, 2007.
Jacques Rancière. The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution Of The Sensible. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Tom Conley. “Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory.” SubStance 34:3 (2005) 96-106.
Suggested Reading: TBA
Week 6 – 23 OCT – Cinema and Technologies of the Image I – Database/Vector
Required reading:
Lev Manovich. “What is Digital Cinema” (http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema.html).
Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Ch. 5. (Presenter: Jessica Thom)
Sean Cubitt The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Ch. 2
Gene Youngblood “Cinema and the Code.” Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Paul Virilio. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. London: Continuum, 2002.
Presenter: Jackie
Suggested Reading:
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making typographic man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. 124-150.
Week 7 – 30 OCT – The Historical Turn in Cinema and Media
Required reading:
Sumiko Higashi, et al. “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn.” Cinema Journal 44.1 (Fall 2004): 94-143.
Tom Gunning. “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity.” Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (Fall 1994): 189-201.
Tom Gunning. “Early American Film.” OGFS 255-171. (Presenter: Lee)
Ben Singer. “Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis.” Melodrama and Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. 101-130 + endnotes. (Presenter: Aimée Mitchell)
David Bordwell. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997). 141-146.
Charlie Keil. “’To Here From Modernity.’ Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema.” American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Eds. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 51-65.
Dudley Andrew. “A Film Aesthetic to Discover.” Journal of Film Studies 17.2-3. 47-71.
Suggested Reading:
Vanessa Schwartz. “Film and History.” SAGE. 199-215.
Week 8 – 6 NOV – National and Transnational Cinema II – Mobility, Circulation and the New Political Economies of Images
Required reading:
Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Ting Wang, Richard Maxwell. Global Hollywood No 2. London: BFI, 2008. Ch. 1-4.
John Urry “Connectivity and Imagining” in Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 156-184
(Presenter: Julia Aoki)
Suggested Reading:
Philip Crang, Claire Dwyer and Peter Jackson. “Transnationalism and the Spaces of Commodity Culture.” Progress in Human Geography 27: 4 (2003): 438-456.
Week 9 – 13 NOV – Cinema and Technologies of the Image III – Affect and Subjectivity
Guest lecture: Sharon Hayashi
Required reading:
Kaja Silverman. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 1-50.
Brian Massumi. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 46-67. (Presenter: Erika Biddle)
Suggested Reading:
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye; A Phenomenology of Film Experience. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1991. 3-50.
Week 10 – 20 NOV – Cinema and Technologies of the Image II – Technology and Borders, New Media, the Avant-garde and Documentary
Guest lecture: Tess Takahashi
Michael Warner. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49-90.
Ien Ang. “In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Postmodernity.” Living Room Wars. NY: Routledge, 1996.
Hollis Frampton. “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative.” Circles of Confusion. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983. pp. 59-68.
Hollis Frampton. “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity.” Circles. pp. 87-106.
Hollis Frampton. “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses.” Circles. pp. 107-116.
Week 11 – 27 NOV – National and Transnational Cinema I – Dis-Locations and Place
Required reading: TBA +
Rey Chow. “A Phantom Discipline.” PMLA 116.5 (2001): 1386-1395. (Presenter: Jane Kim)
Suggested Reading:
Bhaskar Sarkar. “Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives.” SAGE. 123-144.
Week 12 – 4 DEC – New Directions in Cinema and Media Studies II
Required reading: TBA
