Focus on Film Criticism

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Learning outcomes of the course unit

This course seeks to familiarize students with important and transferable critical tools, frameworks, approaches, and skills that will serve to deepen their capacity to engage with, and to read, audiovisual texts critically both on, and hopefully outside of, this course. The course also aims to enable students to appreciate that the interplay between media texts and their various contexts is more than a simple a “sign of the times” or products of visionary filmmakers; that it is also characterized by complex processes of mediation, selection, and interpretation at the levels of production, promotion, and reception.

By the end of the course, students will be expected to possess the critical abilities to produce insightful analysis of film texts; the skills necessary to conduct sound contextual analysis; the demonstrable capacity to synthesize original ideas in a lucid and coherent manner, both verbally and in writing; a solid understanding of the complex social, cultural, historical, and political relationships that have shaped important aspects of American cinematic output (and by implication different forms of audio-visual media produced both inside and outside of the US); and solid understanding of debates circulating the case-studies that comprise the course.

For learning outcomes specific to each session, see week rubrics below.

Mode of study

Seminar with integrated micro-lectures

This course is built around a weekly structured discussion. Students will consider the set readings and a film they will view prior at each session in relation to series of questions provided in advance. The films will provide concrete reference points intended to facilitate understandings of the topics introduced in the readings and developed by the instructor. Discussions will be accompanied by detailed PowerPoint slides, which will be made available to students after the session concludes. By the end of each session, students should be able to demonstrate a solid understanding of the topic generally, of the principal arguments, insights and shortcomings of the set readings; of the ways in which the example films embody, shed light on or complicate these topics; and should be in a position independently to transfer these insights to different case studies.

Prerequisites and co-requisites

-

Course contents

This course aims to enrich students’ deeper understanding of the industrial, cultural, aesthetic, and social dimensions of recent Hollywood cinema. It focuses on the conduct and output of Hollywood in the post-classical period (1967 to the present day), covering some of the most industrially and culturally important developments during this period. These shall include short-lived but significant trends like the Hollywood Renaissance (1967-1976) and Post-9/11 cinema (2004-2008), as well as developments that have exerted a lasting influence on output, such as High Concept and Global Blockbusters. Adopting a revisionist perspective, the course invites students to rethink how these developments have been understood. Accordingly, by considering the conditions underwriting the production and content of such films, students will work toward developing deeper, nuanced, and more informed perspectives on the nature of cultural production and the forces shaping it.

The readings to be found here:

http://portal.amu.cz/~holubova/Hollywood_Cinema/

Session 1 COURSE INTRODUCTION

This session is intended to lay a firm foundation for the course. In addition to introducing ourselves, the session will offer a walk-through of the course, including student responsibilities and assessment protocols. It will also offer insights into the methods and approaches that will be used across the course.

Preparation

N/A

Session 2 THE HOLLYWOOD RENAISSANCE

This session focuses on one of the most discussed developments in American cinema history, and one generally accepted to have marked the shift from Hollywood’s classical period to the contemporary period examined in this course. The Hollywood Renaissance of 1967 to 1976 is said to have involved Hollywood’s wholesale, albeit short-lived, embrace of more arty material and its acquiescence of power to a cohort of young, edgy filmmakers or “movie brats”. However, we will question how pervasive this shift to thematically progressive, stylistically innovative, tonally downbeat cinema really was, and whether the much-vaunted movie brats really played that important a role at this time or whether the whole thing was about cultivating left-liberal audiences with fantasies of subversion and rebellion.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. the putative causes of the Hollywood Renaissance.

II. the putative characteristics of the Renaissance films and their makers.

III. the myths surrounding the Hollywood Renaissance and their makers.

Preparation

Reading: King, 11-48.

Home Screening: Easy Rider (1969)

Session 3 BLAXPLOITATION

This session focuses on arguably the most prominent topical production trend of the early-to-mid 1970s: the Blaxploitation films of 1970 to 1975. Comprising mainly low-budget crime pictures featuring black protagonists, these films represented an attempt to reverse industrial decline by targeting the under-served urban black market. We will consider the extent to which Blaxploitation films sought to monetize concerns structuring the experiences of many black Americans at this time: the waning of black nationalism, the emergence of a black middle-class, and the anxiety these developments were considered to have generated.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. the conditions that precipitated the Blaxploitation production trend of the early 1970s.

II. the topical discourses articulated across many of the Blaxploitation films.

III. the assumed relevancy these discourses held for many black Americans at this time.

Preparation

Reading: Quinne and Kramer, 184-185, 188-198.

Reading: Kraszewski, 48-61

Home Screening: Superfly (1972)

Session 4 THE YOUTH MARKET

This session examines a key development of the contemporary period that tends to be overlooked due to the attention paid to the Hollywood Renaissance and the Blockbuster Era that followed it: the institutionalization of the Hollywood teen film. Students will consider the conditions that led major film companies’ systematically to release product intended primarily or exclusively for young people. The session will also challenge enduring claims that such films have tended to prioritize the male youth audience, by considering the extent to which this niche was in fact governed by a date movie model that angled such fare to both sexes – an approach that in some cases influenced how the films were expected to be consumed, as our case study of the teen sex comedy shows.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. the forces shaping the institutionalization of Hollywood teen films in the late 1970s/1980s.

II. the questionable notion that Hollywood prioritized young males at the expense of females.

III. how and why the period’s teen sex comedies were tailored for youths of both sexes.

Preparation

Reading: Nowell, 2014: 16-32.

Home Screening: The Last American Virgin (1982)

PAPER I DUE

Session 5 THE BLOCKBUSTER ERA AND HIGH CONCEPT

This part of the session concentrates on one of the most significant happenings in American cinema history: the development across the late 1970s and 1980s of the high concept approach to film production and distribution. This method of maximizing revenue from film properties through accessibility, marketability, and licensing is often cited as dominating Hollywood output at this time. However, we will consider why it was actually extremely rare among Hollywood projects, why it really emerged in its most fully-fledged form in the independent sector, and why it only gradually came to be widely used by the late 1990s.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. how historians have constructed the Blockbuster Era as a distinct period in cinema history

II. the features of the High Concept approach said to predominate during this period.

III. the problems inherent in dominant perceptions of the blockbuster era and high concept

Preparation

Reading: Schatz, 8-37.

Reading: Wyatt, 1-22.

Home Screening: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Session 6 FAMILY FILMS

This session examines an important way Hollywood has developed from the early 1990s to the present day, focusing on a key product type said to distinguish this period from earlier ones: the institutionalization of high-end family films. We will consider why this type of film has become central to conglomerate Hollywood’s operations, and think about how its multi-generational targeted audience is addressed. Central to this session, will be an examination of how Hollywood has attempted to use these films to posit itself as the glue that binds families together, and how this form of therapy relates to cultivating consumer loyalty for generations to come. This session will allow us to ask whether Hollywood’s depictions of the family are really as idealized and conservative as tends to be assumed, or if it is actually in Hollywood’s interests to depict the family suffering from partial crises that Hollywood itself can help solve.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. why Family Films increased in industrial importance in the early 1990s (and beyond).

II. the multiple modes of audience address that characterize this genre of film.

III. why and how these films are tailored to strengthen intergenerational family ties.

Preparation

Reading: Allen, 109-134.

Reading: Krämer, 294-311.

Home Screening: Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Session 7 POSTMODERN HORROR

This session examines arguably the most high-profile and discussed developments of the late 1990s, the emergence of a series of horror films that were said to offer smart deconstructions of the genre to media-literate generation Xers. These films were widely understood as smarter and more female-friendly updates of their 70s and 80s forerunners. However, we will ask whether this was really the case, or whether it amounted to one of the most successful acts of mis-marketing in recent cinema history.

Preparation

Reading: Wee, 50-61.

Home Screening: Scream (1996)

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I: the ways scholars and others understood the sophistication of these films

II: the ways they understood their gendered modes of address

III: how such claims can be reimagined as forms of product differentiation and gentrification

Session 8 GIRLY FILMS

One of the most profound shifts in Hollywood output of the late 1990s onwards was the institutionalization of upbeat films aimed squarely at female audiences. These Girly Films, as they are sometimes known, were typically denounced by feminist scholars who felt their fantasies of female self-determination through personal happiness, professional success, and consumeristic indulgence both erased the struggles many women continue to endure and downplayed an ongoing need from feminist activists to fight against these struggles. However, in this session we will consider the extent to which these films potentially offered a different pathway to female satisfaction than the intellectual, politicized sisterhood of the activists, one more pragmatic in nature, and naturally one in which Hollywood would play an important role.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of: I. the Girly Films fit into Hollywood’s historical targeting of women as audiences. II. how and why some feminist thinkers deemed the films’ gender politics problematic. III. how and why some of these films are also critical of the lifestyles they centralize.

Preparation

Reading: Tasker & Negra, 1-24.

Reading: Radner, 26-41.

Home Screening: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Session 9 STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Session 10 BROMANCES

The mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s witnessed a spate of comedies about grown men torn between juvenility and more traditional adult lifestyles. These films were typically seen by scholars as somewhat critical of both “New Ladism” – a knowing prolongation of a juvenile masculinity rooted in homo-sociality, hedonism, and irresponsibility – and a “conformist” adult life of heterosexual monogamy, fatherhood, and professional upward mobility. However, in this part of the session, we will ask whether these films were not doubly celebratory, suggesting that an ideal balance for modern men might be pairing aspects of a traditional adult life with aspects of youthful exuberance, not least the pleasures of experiencing hedonism by proxy via the consumption of films like post-adolescent comedies.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. how post-adolescent comedies have been understood as anti-New Lad films.

II. how post-adolescent comedies may actually promote a measure of New Ladism.

III. the industrial employment of post-adolescent comedy to retain aging male viewers.

Preparation

Reading: Hansen-Miller and Gill, 36-50.

Home Screening: Step Brothers (2008)

Session 11 POST-9/11 CINEMA

Fewer trends have provoked so much scholarly interest as the Post-9/11 cinema of the mid-to-late 2000s. Arguably the most prominent commentator on this topic was Douglas Kellner, who painted a striking image of Hollywood’s responses to the cluster of political discourses that came to represent the Bush-Cheney years that themselves came to represent the notion of “post-9/11”. Kellner posits a traumatized and outraged Hollywood, whose ranks turned en masse to the production of films critical of the Bush-Cheney Whitehouse, especially as its conduct pertained to corruption, pre-emptive violence, US overseas interventionism, surveillance, and torture. However, in this part of the session, we will challenge such claims, by considering the extent to which Hollywood also traded in films articulating ambivalent positions on the Bush-Cheney Whitehouse and in some cases positing virulent support for its conduct as a necessary solution to a tough new world.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of how:

I. the leading film scholar Kellner posits post-9/11 cinema as a form of critical cinema.

II. the extent to which Pro-Bush/Cheney films also characterized this topical trend.

III. how trauma and outrage are limit understandings of films dealing with post-9/11 themes.

Preparation

Reading: Kellner, 163-199.

Home Screening: The Dark Knight (2008)

Session 12 GLOBAL BLOCKBUSTERS

In this session, students will consider the extraordinary lengths to which Hollywood has been going to make its high-end animated, fantasy-adventure, and superhero films marketable and appealing to major international markets during a period of popular Anti-Americanization on the continent. Focusing mainly on twenty-first-century output, such conduct highlights a return to a pre-1967-era standard. As such offers a different perspective to the standard notion that Hollywood’s high-end output has, since the development of the high concept approach, followed a largely unbroken evolutionary trajectory towards media convergence.

Learning Outcomes

To develop a demonstrable understanding of:

I. the conditions leading to Hollywood’s twenty-first-century cultivation of international markets.

II. the challenges Hollywood faced pursuing these targets amid renewed anti-Americanism.

III. how Hollywood employed a set of content-tailoring strategies to frame itself for these markets.

Preparation

Reading: Maltby, 212–217.

Reading: Kramer, 2011, 171–184.

Home Screening: Cars 2 (2011)

FINAL PAPER DUE

Recommended or required reading

Allen Robert C. “Home Alone Together: Hollywood and the ‘Family Film’.” Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. Eds. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby. London: BFI, 1999: 109-134. Print.

Hansen-Miller, David, and Rosalind Gill. “Lad Flicks: Discursive Reconstructions of Masculinity in Popular Film.” Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema. Eds. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer: New York: Routledge, 2011: 36-50. Print

King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema. London: I. B. Taurus, 2002, 11–48. Print.

Krämer, Peter. “Would You Take Your Child to See this Film? The Cultural and Social Work of the Family-adventure Movie.” Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Eds. Steve Neale and Murray Smith. London: Routledge, 1998: 294-311. Print.

Kramer, Peter. “Hollywood and its Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of the Biggest Box Office Hits in the United States and Outside the Unites States since the 1970s.” Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Eds. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers. Oxford: Whiley-Blackwell, 2011: 171–184. Print.

Kraszewski, Jan. “Recontextualizing the Historical Reception of Blaxploitation: Articulations of Class, Black Nationalism, and Anxiety in the Genre’s Advertisements.” The Velvet Light Trap 50 (2002): 48-61. Print.

Kellner, Douglas. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.

Nowell, Richard. “Private School ... For Girls”: Hollywood, the Date Movie Market, and Early 1980s Teen Sex Comedies.” Post Script, 33.2 (2014): 16-32. Print

Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema: Second edition. London: Blackwell, 2003. Print.

Quinne, Eithne and Peter Kramer. “Blaxploitation.” Contemporary American Cinema. Eds. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond. New York: Open University Press, 2006: 184-185, 188-198. Print.

Radner, Hilary. Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Schatz, Thomas. “The New Hollywood.” Film Theory Goes to the Movies. Eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Collins. Routledge, New York, 1993: 8-37. Print.

Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, „Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture“, in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Valerie Wee, “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The Case of Scream”, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 35, no. 2 (2006), pp. 50-61.

Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Print.

Assessment methods and criteria

This course is graded on three equally weighted assessments. Guidelines on each prompt will be issued when students are expected to turn their attention to the assessment in question.

Assessment and Final Grade

1. Paper I (circa 2000 words): 33.3%
2. Presentation (10 minutes in length): 33.3%
3. Final Paper (circa 2000 words): 33.3%

Assessment: 2 x 2000-word essays, 1 x 10-minute presentation

Paper I

Students are to submit a circa 2000-word essay in response to ONE of the three prompts corresponding to a topic introduced in sessions 2-4 respectively.

Due Date:

Presentation Students are to deliver a circa 10-minute presentation in response to ONE of the four prompts corresponding to a topic introduced in sessions 5-8 respectively.

Final Paper

Students are to submit a circa 2000-word essay in response to ONE of the three prompts corresponding to a topic introduced in sessions 10-12 respectively.

Due Date:

Submission Protocol

Essays are to be submitted in PDF or word format to richard_nowell@hotmail.com. Confirmation of receipt will always be sent shortly after the essay has been received. If you have not received a receipt within 12 hours, please assume that your essay has not been received. Under such circumstances, please be advised to either resend the essay or contact me to see if there is another reason why no receipt has been issued.

Penalties for Late Submission of Work

Up to 24 hours after the due date - 5 marks out of 100 deducted

Between 24 and 48 after the due to date - 10 marks out of 100 deducted

Between 48 and 72 hours after the due date - 15 marks out of 100 deducted

Between 72 and 96 hours after the due date - 20 marks out of 100 deducted

More than 96 hours after due date - all marks deducted

Note

Note on electronics in class

Except during breaks or unless otherwise stated, electronic devices may NOT be used at any time during this class. The one exception is that Kindles may be used to refer to the assigned readings. It needs to be stressed that all slides are made available to students after each session and that any notes that do need to be taken can be made with pen and paper.

Further information

No schedule has been prepared for this course

The subject is a part of the following study plans