FILM 392 - Research Seminar in Film History and Theory

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

This course is designed as an in-depth exploration of either a given author or a theoretical topic. Students contribute to the class through research projects and oral presentations. Their work culminates in lengthy research papers. Because topics change, students are permitted (encouraged) to take this course more than once. Preference is given to film majors who must take this class during their senior year; junior majors and others admitted if space permits.

Topic for 2014/15a: Sensuous Theory. This seminar explores the relationship between film and the senses. How can film, an audio-visual medium, represent and engage with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell? How might films employ the senses to reconfigure the relationship between the cinema and the spectator? How can these sensuous films articulate senses of belonging, displacement, or exile? The seminar situates our discussions of these questions within discourses of film phenomenology, postmodernism, gender studies, and postcolonialism. Readings may include: Jennifer M. Barker (The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, 2009), Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, 2010), Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, 2000, and Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 2002), Hamid Naficy (An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 2001), and Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 2004). Film screenings may include: Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929), Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), Tetsuo, the Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1992), Calendar (Atom Egoyan, 1993), Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), and The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011).

Topic for 2014/15b: American Horror Cinema. An advanced seminar in American horror cinema. It facilitates in-depth analysis and close readings of classic horror films. This course explores the production, reception, aesthetics and politics of an evolving genre. We begin with the classic 1930’s studio monster movies like Dracula, Frankenstein and Cat People. Next, we examine Cold War politics and its influence on films like, I Married a Monster from Outer Space. Landmark movies responsible for shifts in the genre’s paradigm (like Psycho) are contextualized. We trace the genealogy of zombie movies from the Vietnam era to the present - considering their relationship to the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. Teen slasher pictures reached their apex in the Seventies, only to be re-invented in the Nineties for the Scream franchise. Television also exploits the appeal and popularity of teen horror genres with programs like True Blood. The course concludes with post-apocalyptic horror and its expression of millenarian anxiety in films such as Avatar, Legion and World War Z. The work of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Brian DePalma, David Cronenberg and Mary Harron, among others, will be studied. Ms. Mask.

Prerequisites: FILM 210 /FILM 211 , two additional units in film history and theory, and permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period, plus film screenings.