CINE700 Introduction to Graduate Studies

Focus on Marx and Freud

Instructor:

Aaron Kerner

Office: FA536

Office Hours:

Wed 9:00-1:00

Or by appointment.

Contact:

amkerner@sfsu.edu

http://online.sfsu.edu/~amkerner

Course Description: Orientation to graduate study. One or two major thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Marx, Freud and their influence on film study. Development of a tentative master’s thesis forms the primary basis for written work.

For this specific course, we will be focusing on the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud; the discipline of film studies is largely informed by these figures. I would like to take this opportunity to study the original texts that film scholars have employed in their analysis of film. In addition to these original source texts we will also survey some of the “updated texts,” for example, Guy Debord’s reformulation of key Marxist principles accounting for the postmodern experience, as well as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva’s respective modification of Freudian principles.

The course will be assessed on four criteria:

· Weekly Questions: each student should prepare a series of questions that are intended to provoke discussion amongst the group. Prepare at least 4 typed questions. These questions should directly address the assigned reading material for the day. The intention is that these questions might be used to initiate dialogue in the classroom. These questions should be submitted to the instructor at the conclusion of each class meeting.

· Discussion Leader: each student should assume the role as primary facilitator at least once during the semester. In this role, the student should – in addition to the requisite weekly questions – should have additional questions, prompts, video clips and/or some other material that will help to guide the class in a productive discussion of the course material. The student should consult with the instructor to coordinate the activities for the assigned class meeting.

· Short Paper: each student is expected to write a 4-5 page project proposal for an MA Thesis (Mock Thesis Proposal). This will be due at the half-way mark of the semester (Session 8).

o Statement of thesis

o Outline

o Bibliography/Filmography

o Time Schedule

· Long Research Paper: each student will write a 15 page paper expanding on the short paper; if the student wishes to diverge from their earlier idea, they should consult with the instructor. This should be submitted on the final class meeting (Session 16).

Weekly Questions:	20%
Discussion Leader:	20%
Short Paper:	20%
Long Research Paper:	40%

Reading is available online either through an electronic database or through electronic reserves. The password for electronic reserves is: TBA

NB: This syllabus is subject to change.

Session 1: August 24 NO CLASS

Session 2: August 31

Presentation: Clay Calder – Graduate Division, Continuing Student Specialist (confirmed)

Screening:

Powaqqatsi, Godfrey Reggio, 1988

September 7 - LABOR DAY NO CLASS

Session 3: September 14

Presentation: Jeffrey Masko (current MA student) Annual MA Conference October 15-17, 2009 (confirmed)

Screening:

Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju, 1949

Selected clips from Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin, 1936

Selected clips from Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929

Selected clips from Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater, 2006

Selected clips from Meat, Frederick Wiseman, 1976

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.

Jonathan Beller, “Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money,” boundary 2 vol. 26, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 151-199. Available via Project Muse.

Session 4: September 21

Presentation: Research Methods

Oxford English Dictionary

Peer Reviewed Journals vs. the Web

Databases:

o JSTOR

o Project Muse

o MLA

When is it okay to use Wikipedia?

Chicago Manual of Style (click for style manual)

Generating Footnotes/Endnotes in Word

What’s the difference between works cited, and a bibliography?

Screening:

Love and Pop, Anno Hideaki, 1998

Sneakin’ and Peekin’, Tom Palazzolo from the collection Xperimental Eros, curated by Noel Lawrence (assisted by Craig Baldwin), 2007

Selected clips from The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron, 2005

Selected clips from Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, Gough Lewis, 2002

Reading:

Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One, Frederick Engels ed., trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 76 – 88.

Robert Miklitsch, “The Commodity-Body-Sign: Toward a General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism’,” Cultural Critique 33 (Spring, 1996): 5-40. Available via JSTOR

Session 5: September 28

Faculty presentation: Randy Rutsky “On PhD Programs” (confirmed)

Discussion Leader #1:

Screening:

Selected clips from Fight Club, David Fincher, 1999

Selected clips from The Notebook, Nick Cassavetes, 2004

Selected clips from Dawn of the Dead, 1978

Selected clips from Elephant, Gus Van Sant, 2003

Selected clips from Chain, Jem Cohen, 2004

Selected clips from Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1973

This is not a kiss, Christopher Bannister, 2009

Reading:

R. L. Rutsky, “Information Wants to be Consumed,” Consumption in an Age of Information (New York: Berg, 2005), 61 – 75.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, read chapters 1 – 4 (click here).

NOTE: the Situationists did not believe in copyright – the idea of commodifying “ideas” was absurd – and thus is freely available online at nothingness.org.

Session 6: October 5

Faculty Presentation: Jenny Lau "On the Society for Cinema and Media Studies" (Los Angeles Conference) (confirmed)

Discussion Leader #2: Milisa and James

Screening:

Selected clips from Stepford Wives, Bryan Forbes, 1975

Selected clips from Valley of the Dolls, Mark Robinson, 1967

Selected clips from Sexbot, Summre Gaston, 2007

Selected clips from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks, 1953

“Material Girl,” Madonna, music video

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.

Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, "'Judou': A Hermeneutical Reading of Cross-Cultural Cinema," Film Quarterly vol. 45, no. 2 (Winter, 1991-1992): 2-10. Available via JSTOR

Session 7: October 12

Discussion Leader #3: Tess

Presentation:

CINE897 & CINE898 (CINE610)

Research Preparation

Length

Pacing and Advisor/Advisee protocol

Screening:

Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais, 1959

Selected clips from Let there be light, John Huston, 1946

Reading:

J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, “Unconscious,” The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 474 - 476.

Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis (1912),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 22 – 29.

Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious (1915),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 98 – 136.

Annual MA Conference October 15 - 17 see conference website

Session 8 October 19 

Discussion Leader #4: Megan and Pat

Screening:

Bara no soretsu, Toshio Matsumoto, 1969 (Funeral Parade of Roses)

Selected clips from Solaris, Steven Soderbergh, 2002

Selected clips from Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972

Selected clips from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 1, 2, & 3, Sophie Fiennes, 2006

Reading:

J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, “Repression,” The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 390 - 394.

Sigmund Freud, “Repression (1915),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 84 – 97.

Session 9: October 26 FURLOUGH DAY NO CLASS

Discussion Leader:

Screening:

Persona, Ingmar Bergman, 1966

Reading:

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 368 – 407.

Session 10: November 2

Discussion Leader #5: Stephan and Anastasia

Screening:

Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929

Selected clips from Paprika, Satoshi Kon, 2006

Selected clips from Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock, 1945

Selected clips from The Cell, Tarsem Singh, 2000

Selected clips from The Piano, Jane Campion, 1993

Selected clips from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 1, 2, & 3, Sophie Fiennes, 2006

Reading:

Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work,” in Sigmund Freud: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W W Norton & Company, 1989), 209 - 226.

Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism (1927),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 5, James Strachey, ed. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 198 – 204.

Session 11: November 9

Faculty presentation: Bill Nichols “On Letters of Reference” (unconfirmed)

Discussion Leader #6: Deepa and Wolfgang

Screening:

Selected shorts from September 11th, Alain Brigand (creative producer), 2002

25th Hour, Spike Lee, 2002

Reading:

Bill Nichols, “The Terrorist Event,” in Mark Franko, ed., Ritual and Event (New York: Routledge, 2007), 93 – 108.

J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, “Screen Memory,” The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 410 - 411.

Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories (1899),” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Volume 5, James Strachey, ed. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959), 47 – 69.

Session 12: November 16

Faculty presentation: Jennifer Hammett – CV Workshop (confirmed)

Discussion Leader #7: Hart and Deborah

Screening:

Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien, 1988

Removed, Naomi Uman, 1999

Selected clips from Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

Selected clips from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks, 1953

Selected clips from She Must Be Seeing Things, Shelia McLaughlin, 1987

Reading:

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14 – 26.

Jennifer Hammett, “The Ideological Impediment: Feminism and Film Theory,” Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2, (Winter 1997): 85-99. Available via JSTOR

CV Workshop (download from e-res).

November 23 Fall Recess NO CLASS

Session 13: November 30

Discussion Leader #8: Dan and Jesse

Screening:

Office Killer, Cindy Sherman, 1997

Reading:

Laura Mulvey, “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or ‘You Don’t Know What Is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?’” in Visual and Other Pleasures 6 – 13.

Laura Mulvey, “Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87,” in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 65 – 76.

Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” in Victor Burgin et al. eds., Formations of Fantasy (New York: Methuen, 1986).

Session 14: December 7 FURLOUGH DAY NO CLASS

Discussion Leader:

Screening:

Selected clips from Happiness, Todd Solondz, 1998

Selected clips from Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, 1991

Selected clips from Gummo, Harmony Korine, 1997

Selected clips from Oedipus Rex, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967

Reading:

Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi eds., “Abjection,” in The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 1.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1 – 31.

Session 15 December 14 FURLOUGH DAY NO CLASS

Discussion Leader:

Screening:

Selected clips from Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper, 1982

Selected clips from The Hunger, Tony Scott, 1983

Selected clips from Penetration Angst, Wolfgang Büld, 2003

Selected clips from I Spit on Your Grave, Meir Zarchi, 1978

Selected clips from Videodrome, David Cronenberg, 1983

Selected clips from The Brood, David Cronenberg, 1979

Selected clips from Teeth, Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007

Reading:

Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Bill Nichols ed., Movie and Methods Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 195 – 219.

Barbara Creed, “Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection,” in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8 – 15.

Barbara Creed, “Medusa’s Head: The Vagina Dentata and Freudian Theory,” in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 105 – 121.

Session 16 December 21

Submit Final Paper no later than December 21 via email