Circulating within The Modern Cinematic Image

Course unit code:

311CMCI

Course unit title:

Mode of delivery:

zkouška

Range:

4/T

Type of course unit:

Study plan Fotografie EN - bakalář – optional subject
Study plan Fotografie EN - magistr – optional subject
Study plan Cinema and Digital Media - Cinematography – optional subject
Study plan Cinema and Digital Media - Screenwriting – optional subject
Study plan Erasmus – optional subject
Study plan Cinema and Digital Media - Directing – optional subject
Study plan Fotografie EN - magistr: restaurování – optional subject

Level of course unit:

Year of study

předmět nemá určen ročník studia

Semester when the course unit is delivered

zimní

Number of ECTS credits allocated:

Garant předmětu:

Erik RORABACK

Name of lecturer(s):

Erik RORABACK

Study Objectives:

This course will teach the student both how to watch a film and how to use

other disciplines to throw more clear light on the cultural form of cinema."

Mode of delivery:

lecture plus discussion

Prerequisites and co-requisites:

no prerequsities

Recommended optional programme components

not applicable

Course contents:

This inter-disciplinary seminar is modeled on the epistemological notion of a U.S.-American-informed postmodernity/globalization, which for worse or for ill informs our contemporaneity, and which by extension for us as such produces our class that pedagogically engages a select examination of global films from the following twentieth-century world-directors: Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Theodor Dreyer, D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, Dziga Vertov, and Orson Welles (i.e., pre-1947 Occidental and Soviet cinema) with special focus given to those cinematic moments that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory viewing strategies, in new creative ways of circulating (our term for moving), and so by extension in new nonsadistic ways of engaging with the most essential element of the cinema: the aesthetic unit of the image. The rôle of silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be given special coverage.

Film criticism and film philosophy from Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit, David A. Cook, Gilles Deleuze, Siegfried Kracauer, Niklas Luhmann, Todd McGowan, Edgar Morin, Jacques Ranci?re, Erik S. Roraback, Steven Shaviro and François Truffaut, will be our principal textual objects of focus. All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or

sub-titles. Clips and special features from the DVDs will also be shown. The course is conducted in English and consists of three clock hour long sessions (i.e., four academic hours) to allow sufficient time for both the screenings and for seminar lecture/discussion. Strategically, we shall engage our target pictures in a non-orthodox counter chronological way in order to undercut over facile teleological ways of thinking and of reasoning; it will also provide us with a different perspective on the evolutionary development of arguably one of the more important and influential cultural forms of the twentieth-century.

Study materials:

Barber, Stephen : The Screaming Body (Creation, 1999).

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit : Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Harvard, 1993).

Conrad, Peter : The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles (Faber & Faber, 2003).

Cook, David A. : A History of Narrative Film (Norton, 2004).

Deleuze, Gilles : Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minnesota, 1986).

_____ . Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota, 1989).

Drew, William M. D.W. Griffith?s ?Intolerance?: Its Genesis and its Vision. (McFarland, 2001)

Kracauer, Siegfried : From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1947).

Lambert, Gregg : ?Cinema and the Outside? and ?The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze? in

Flaxman, Gregory, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minnesota, 2000).

Luhmann, Niklas : The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

McGowan, Todd : The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (SUNY, 2007).

Morin, Edgar : The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Morimer (Minnesota, 2005).

_____ . The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, foreword Lorraine Mortimer (Minnesota, 2005).

Nancy, Jean-Luc : The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, trans. with an intro. François Raffoul and David

Pettigew (Albany: SUNY P, 2007).

Ranci?re, Jacques : Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Berg, 2006).

_____ . The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2007).

Roraback, Erik S. : a select band of essays adduced below from a tome in progress,

The Stars of a Constellation; or, Film, Movement & Silence.

Shaviro, Steven : The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 2 (Minnesota, 1993).

Truffaut, François : ?Foreword? to André Bazin?s Orson Welles: A Critical View (Acrobat, 1978), pp. 1-27.

Planned learning activities and teaching methods

not applicable

Assessment methods and criteria

To receive credit for the seminar students must 1) have no more than one absences; every absence beyond one results in your grade being lowered one full letter grade 2) give one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s) for that week 3) submit a mid-term essay and 4) produce a final essay. Final essay (2500 words): 30%, Mid-term essay (1500 words): 20%, Oral presentation: 20%, Attendance and participation: 30%. Essay topics will be distributed at least two weeks before they are due. Arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that session.

Language of instruction:

English

Work placement(s):

Pracovní stáž není u tohoto předmětu zavedena.

Course web page:

Note:

not applicable

Schedule for winter semester 2011/2012:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

Schedule for summer semester 2011/2012:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

The subject is a part of the following study plans:

Fotografie EN - bakalář (optional subject)
Fotografie EN - magistr (optional subject)
Cinema and Digital Media - Cinematography (optional subject)
Cinema and Digital Media - Screenwriting (optional subject)
Erasmus (optional subject)
Cinema and Digital Media - Directing (optional subject)
Fotografie EN - magistr: restaurování (optional subject)