CINE 372: Film Theory
Spring 2005
Friday 9:10 to 11:55
Office: FA 435
Email: amkerner@sfsu.edu
Website: http://online.sfsu.edu/~amkerner/index.html
Office Hours: Thursday 5:00 - 6:00
Course Description: This course focuses on film theory and the cultural/economic/social theories that inform it. The overall concern of the course surveys the significance of visual culture in society. How are cinematic images manipulated? How do they affect culture? How do they acquire cultural, economic or social value? The course is divided into three general topics: Commodity Exchange, Visual Pleasure and Questions of Narrative Form.
I want to dedicate some time to developing research and critical thinking skills. Some class time will be set aside specifically to work on research skills and rhetorical development.
Course Requirements:
1. Attend all class meetings
2. Readings must be completed by the assigned dates
3. All written work must be submitted on time
Course Assessment:
|
Paper One |
30% |
|
Paper Two |
30% |
|
Paper Three |
30% |
|
Attendance/Participation |
10% |
Plagiarism and other issues concerning academic integrity will not be tolerated, and is grounds for an automatic failure in the course.
NB: This syllabus is subject to change at any time.
Turn off your cell phones and all other electronic devices!
Citation Method - Chicago Manual of Style:
Footnotes/Endnotes (for direct quotations and for paraphrasing other people's work):
BOOK:
FIRST NAME LAST NAME, TITLE OF BOOK, (CITY: PUBLISHER, DATE), PAGE NUMBER.
JOURNAL ARTICLE:
AUTHOR'S NAME, "ARTICLE TITLE," JOURNAL TITLE, VOL #, NO. # (DATE): PAGE NUMBER.
CINEMA:
FILM TITLE, DIRECTOR'S NAME, (DATE).
Bibliography (a bibliography should include all the work that you looked at in preparation for writing your paper):
BOOK:
LAST NAME, FIRST NAME. TITLE OF BOOK. CITY: PUBLISHER, DATE.
JOURNAL ARTICLE:
LAST NAME, FIRST NAME. "ARTICLE TITLE." JOURNAL TITLE VOL, NO. (DATE): PAGES.
CINEMA:
FILM TITLE, DIRECTED BY JOHN DOE, LENGTH OF FILM (E.G., 90 MINS.), DATE OF RELEASE, FORMAT (E.G., DVD, VIDEOCASETTE, FILM).
Course Text: All the readings are either available through Electronic Reserves, a database (e.g., Project Muse, JSTOR), or online as specified on the syllabus. The password for Electronic Reserve is: DEBORD. All the work is on Electronic Reserve unless stated otherwise.
Introduction
Session 1 February 4th:
Screening:
The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003
Session 2 February 11th:
Screening:
The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965
Reading:
Kaja Silverman, "Suture," The Subject of Semiotics, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 194 - 236.
The
Culture Industry: Commodity Exchange
Session 3 February 18th:
Screening:
Delicatessen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Marc Caro, 1991
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway, 1989
Dawn of the Dead, George Romero, 1978
Reading:
Karl Marx, "Chapter 1 - Commodities," Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One, Frederick Engels, ed., trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 35 - 46.
Stephen Harper, "Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead," Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to the Present, vol., 1, no. 2 (Fall 2002):
<http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm>
Session 4 February 25th:
Screening:
Elephant, Gus Van Sant, 2003
Fight Club, David Fincher, 1999
Reading:
Guy Debord, "Chapter 1 Separation Perfected," in Society of the Spectacle, <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4>
Guy Debord, "Theory of the Derive," originally in Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956). <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/314>
Session 5 March 4th:
Screening:
Valley of the Dolls, Mark Robinson, 1967
Reading:
Luce Irigaray, "Women on the Market," and "Commodities among Themselves," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 170 - 197.
(Arguments
for and Against) Visual Pleasure
Session 6 March 11th: First Paper Due
Screening:
The Stepford Wives, Bryan Forbes, 1975
Reading:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," in Movies and Methods Volume II. Bill Nichols, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 303 - 315.
Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism" Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 5, James Strachey ed. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1960), 198 - 204.
Session 7 March 18th:
Screening:
Removed, Naomi Uman, 1999
Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997
Fuses, Carolee Schneemann, 1967
Imaging her erotics: Carolee Schneemann, Maria Beatty, 1993
Reading:
Kelly Dennis, "Leave it to Beaver: The Object of Pornography," Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna, Randy Rutsky, and Bradley Macdonald, eds. (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 187 - 224.
OPTIONAL: An Interview with Carolee Schneemann, Wide Angle vol. 20, no. 1 (1998): 20 - 49. Available through the Project Muse database.
Session 8 April 1st:
Screening:
Looking For Langston, Isaac Julien, 1989
Brother to Brother, Rodney Evans, 2004 (subject to availability)
Reading:
Isaac Julien interviewed by Bruce Morrow, Callaloo vol. 18, no. 2 (1995): 406 - 415. Available through the Project Muse database.
Manthia Diawara, "The Absent One: The Avant-Garde and the Black Imaginary in Looking for Langston," Wide Angle vol. 13, no. 3/4 (July-October, 1991): 96 - 109.
Session 9 April 8th:
Screening:
The Pillow Book, Peter Greenaway, 1996
Reading:
Pier Paolo Pasolini, "The Cinema of Poetry," Heretical Empiricism, Louise K. Barnet, ed., trans. Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 167 - 186.
"Peter Greenaway: An Interview," interviewed by Lawrence Chua, Peter Greenaway Interviews Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras, eds., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, 176 - 185.
Documentary,
Realism, and Questioning Narrative Forms
Session 10 April 15th: Second Paper
Due
Screening:
Fog of War, Errol Morris, 2003
Reading:
Bill Nichols, "The Documentary
Film and Principles of Exposition," Ideology and the Image: Social Representation
in the Cinema and Other Media, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1981), 170 - 207.
Session 11 April 22nd:
Screening:
The couple in the cage: a Guatinaui odyssey, Guillermo G—mez-Pe–a and Coco Fusco, 1993
She Wants To Talk To You, Anita Chang, 2001
Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1982
Reading:
Bill Nichols, "The Ethnographer's Tale," in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from VAR 1990-1994, Lucien Taylor, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994, 60-83.
Session 12 April 29th:
Screening:
Reassemblage: from the firelight to the screen, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982
Surname Viêt, given name Nam: a film, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989
Reading:
Trinh T. Minh-ha, "The Totalizing Quest for Meaning," When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 29 - 50.
Scott MacDonald, "Trinh T. Minh-ha: Naked Spaces - Living Is Round," Avant-Garde Film, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147 - 156.
Session 13 May 6th:
Screening:
Bara no soretsu, Matsumoto Toshio, 1969 [Funeral Parade of Roses]
Reading:
Abe Mark(us) Normes, "The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark," positions: east asia cultures critique vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 39 - 78. Available through Project Muse.
Session 14 May 13th:
Final Paper Workshop - in-class preparation for the final paper.
Session 15 May 20th: