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 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. Sophia Harvey.

Topic for 2022/23a: 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: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Calendar (Atom Egoyan, 1993), Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar, 2011), Cyclo (Tran, Anh Hung, 1995), Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015),Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971), and Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019). Sophia Harvey.

Topic for 2022/23b: Political and Militant Cinemas. How can film participate in or precipitate revolutionary social change? What are some dominant ways in which engaged cinemas have depicted such change? This course begins by defining political and militant cinemas, exploring the different ways in which cinema has been used in revolutionary struggles across the past century, as well as the ways in which the meanings of these terms changes drastically depending on their context. We will examine films that played key roles in organized resistance to fascist and authoritarian regimes (Battle of Chile, In the Name of God) as well as those that draw attention to their afterlives (Wolf House). In addition, we will attend to the cinemas of various liberation movements within established democracies, such as those of the Newsreel and New Day collectives in the United States. Throughout the course, a key concern will be the ways in which political and militant cinemas have foregrounded and utilized form as a way to articulate their positions and achieve their goals, from Derek Jarman’s use of experimental minimalism in Blue to Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s invocation of Tropicalism and exploitation in Bacurau. Assignments include a topic proposal workshop, discussion leadership, annotated bibliography, and seminar paper. Erica Stein.

Prerequisite(s): FILM 209; two additional units in film history and theory, and permission of the instructor.

Corequisite(s): FILM 391, Fall semester only.

One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.

Course Format: CLS