Program Courses
Please note that course schedules may be amended due to low enrollment, faculty availability, and/or other factors.
Online Sync Sessions are an integral part of the online learning experience. Additional information about learning concepts and assignments may be discussed and sync sessions offer valuable opportunities for students to interact with their faculty and peers during the term. We encourage all students to attend live, but if they are unable to, sync sessions will be recorded and posted within Canvas to allow for an asynchronous model of success as well.
LIT 492-0 : Special Topics in Literature: Films About Filmmaking
Description
This course will take as its primary focus films which are explicitly about the filmmaking process (and in one case, about video and television). On the one hand, these films give us a historical record of how the cinema has thought about itself: as art form, as social-cultural force, and as industrial practice. In addition, though, these films provide us with a perfect entrée to explore the key issues of film theory. The films to be studied are Keaton, Sherlock Jr.; Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera; Wilder, Sunset Blvd; Fellini, 8-1/2; Godard, Contempt; Minelli, 2 Weeks in Another Town; Fassbinder, Veronica Voss; Clarke, Portrait of Jason; Cronenberg, Videodrome; and Lynch, Mulholland Drive. The issues in film theory that will be paired with the appropriate films include spectatorship (including gendered and queer spectatorship); modernity / montage / Frankfurt School; the formal system and Fordist practices of classical Hollywood; realism and aesthetics of the art cinema; Brecht and counter-cinema; psychoanalysis and apparatus theory; theories of melodrama; decolonization and cinema; and postmodern aesthetics.