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[Sep. 10th, 2013|01:37 pm]
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This syllabus is entirely built out of readings on the Yale Film Studies theory "canon list": it is that list, essentially. The films are also drawn from the "film canon." Really the ground-plan for a workshop.

A workshop in film theory.

3:30-5:30 WLH 002

Screenings Sunday at 5:30, mostly in WHC Auditorium

Readings will be available as pdfs (Dropbox)

Week 1 (August 29): Introduction

Week 2 (September 5): Institutions

Screening (September 1): Sunrise; Goddess (WHC Auditorium)

Readings: Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp. 1-84, 155-261, 298-308, 365-385.
James Lastra, chapter 4 from Sound Technology and the American Cinema
Thomas Schatz, from The Genius of the System, Parts I and II.
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing film studies

Week 3 (September 12): Ideological Analysis

Screening (September 8): Lawrence of Arabia (WHC Auditorium)

Readings: Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” [in Rosen]
Heath, “Narrative Space” [in Rosen]
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
J-L Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
F Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” [from Signatures of the Visible]

Week 4 (September 19): Experimental Film

Screening (September 15, at 5 pm; IN 212 YORK): Entr'acte; Wavelength; FOLLOWED BY "ABERRATIONS OF LIGHT (BLOCK AND RECODER) AT 7 IN THE WHC

Readings: Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors On Vision”
Sitney, P.A “Major Mythopoeia” from Visionary Cinema
Maya Deren An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film

Week 5 (September 26): Race and Ethnicity

Screening (September 22): Blonde Venus; Les Maitres Fous; Do the Right Thing

Readings: Jane Gaines. “On Looking Relations”
Richard Dyer, “White”

Week 6 (October 3): Subjectivity and Gender

Screening (September 29): Letter from Unknown Woman; Law of Desire

Readings: Christian Metz, “Identification,” “Mirror” “The Passion for
Perceiving” from Imaginary Signifier
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator”

Week 7 (October 10): Film and Reality

Screening (October 6): L'Atalante; Traveling Players

Readings: Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? v. 1
Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement Image ch 1-4; Cinema 2: the Time Image, ch 1.
Siegfried Kracauer, “Basic Concepts”; “The Establishment of Physical Existence”
Rudolf Arnheim, “Film and Reality”; “The Complete Film”
Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film”

Week 8 (October 17): Film Language and Style

Screening (October 13): Stagecoach; Ugetsu

Reading: Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cinema of Poetry”
David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film , part III
Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot” and “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema”
Nick Browne, “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach”
Raymond, Bellour, “The Obvious and the Code” [Rosen, Narrative Apparatus Ideologyl]
Noel Burch, Chapter One of Theory of Film Practice
Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is!, ch 2

Week 9 (October 31): Sound and image

Screening (October 20): M; Conversation

Readings: Pascal Bonitzer, “Silence of the Voice” [in Rosen]
Jean Epstein, “Photogenie” [Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism I]
Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” [Image Music Text]
Michel Chion, “Projections of Sound on Image” [Audio-Vision]
Bela Balazs, “The Close-up” and “The Face of Man”
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound”
Eisenstein, “Sound and Image (Montage 1938)” [in The Film Sense]

Week 10 (November 7): Non-fiction

Screening (Nov. 3): Chronicle of a Summer; High School

Readings: Philip Rosen, “Document and Documentary: on the Persistence of Historical Concepts” in Rosen, Change Mummified
Brian Winston, “The Documentary film as Scientific Inscription” in Renov
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye (“We: Variant of a Manifesto”; “Kinoks: A Revolution”; “On the Significance of Non-Acted Cinema”; “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye”)

Week 11 (November 14): Media and adaptation

Screening (November 10): Pandora's Box; Gospel According to Matthew

Readings: Bazin, “Cinema as Digest” [in Naremore: Film Adaptation]
Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today” [in The Film Sense]
D. Andrew, “Adaptation”; [in Naremore: Film Adaptation]
Stanley Cavell, “Photograph and Screen” from The World Viewed

Week 12 (November 21): Genre

Screening (November 17): 42nd Street; Antonio dos Mortes

Readings: Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur”
Solanas and Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema” [in Robert Stam, ed., Film Theory]
Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema” [in Stam]
Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” [in Film/Genre]

Week 13 (December 5): Auteurs and stars

Screening (December 1): The Tramp; Jeanne Dielman

Readings: Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”
Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory”
Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs” [in P. Graham, The New Wave]

Final paper due December 22

Requirements: final paper; workshop participation at every session; mandatory attendance of screenings
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