Circulating within The Postmodern Cinematic Image

Display Schedule

Code Completion Credits Range Language Instruction Semester
311CIRP ZK 3 4T English summer

Subject guarantor

Name of lecturer(s)

Erik Sherman RORABACK

Learning outcomes of the course unit

By the end of the course students will:

-learn both - how to watch a film and how to use other disciplines to throw more clear light on the cultural form of cinema

-recognize a different perspective on the development of an important and influential cultural form of the twentieth century, the cultural system of film

Mode of study

lecture plus discussion

Prerequisites and co-requisites

no prerequsities

Course contents

This interdisciplinary seminar is modeled on the epistemological notion of a US American-informed postmodernity/globalization and now indeed post-post-modernity deglobalization, which informs our contemporaneity, and which by extension for us produces the material in the present class that engages a select examination of global films from the following post-war world-directors of narrative cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), and Orson Welles (USA), (i.e., post-1947 Occidental and Soviet cinema). Special focus will be 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 not only economic circulation, but for interpretive work of the moving eye and mind and so of motion too) and in new non sadistic ways of engaging with the aesthetic unit of the image. The rôle of silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be given coverage. Film criticism and film philosophy from Walter Benjamin (Germany), Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit (USA), David A. Cook (USA), Gilles Deleuze (France), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Jacques Rancière (France), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czech Republic), Steven Shaviro (USA), François Truffaut (USA) and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK), will be our principal objects of focus.

The course covers following topics:

American Neo-Noir and the American Sublime

Das Neue Kino: Fassbinder (New German Cinema)

Soviet Cinema, Icon Art and the Medieval

Post French New Wave Cinema, Life and Death

After Italian Neorealism and Contemporary Eros

American Film Noir II

The Euroamerican Sublime

Recommended or required reading

BENJAMIN, Walter: selected texts from the series of volumes with Harvard Univ. Press to be announced.

BERSANI, Leo, DUTOIT, Ulysse. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994. [256 s.] ISBN 9780674048768.

BERSANI, Leo and DUTOIT, Ulysse, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: BFI, 2010

BIRD, Robert. Andrei Rublev, London: BFI, 2004.

CONRAD, Peter: The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles.London: Faber & Faber, 2003

COOK, David A.: A History of Narrative Film. New York:: Norton, 2004

DELEUZE, Gilles: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986

DELEUZE, Gilles: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986

LAMBERT, Gregg: “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: University of Minnesota Press 2000

LE FANU, Mark. “Stalker” in The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. London: BFI, 1987. pp. 92–107.

LUHMANN, Niklas: The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross. Cambridge: Polity Press 2000.

MCGOWAN, Todd: The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York: SUNY, 2007).

MORIN, Edgar: The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

MORIN, Edgar: The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, foreword Lorraine Mortimer Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005

NANCY, Jean-Luc: The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, trans. with an intro. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew Albany: SUNY P, 2007

NAREMORE, James: The Magic World of Orson Welles. Oxford, 1978 reprinted Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1989

RANCIÉRE, Jacques: Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg, 2006

RANCIÉRE, Jacques: The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2007

RORABACK, Erik S. a select band of essays adduced above (some published and/or presented at conferences or given as guest lectures) from a book that is being prepared for publication.

SHAVIRO, Steven: The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 2. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993

THOMSEN, Christian Braad: “The Double Man”, “Bavaria and Hollywood” and “Querelle” in Fassbinder: The Life and

Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers. London: Faber and Faber, 1997) pp. 1–44, 101–10 and 302–11.

TRUFFAUT, François: “Foreword” to André Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical View. Los Angeles: Acrobat, 1978, pp. 1–27.

ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, ed.: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London: Verso, 2010.

Assessment methods and criteria

Attendance - no more than one absence out of the fourteen total weekly sessions

Student work is evaluated based on one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s), mid-term essay (1500 words) and a Final essay (3000 words).

The course grade will be calculated as follows:

Attendance and participation - 30%

Mid-term essay - 20%

Oral presentation - 20%

Final essay - 30%

Note

-

Schedule for winter semester 2020/2021:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

Schedule for summer semester 2020/2021:

06:00–08:0008:00–10:0010:00–12:0012:00–14:0014:00–16:0016:00–18:0018:00–20:0020:00–22:0022:00–24:00
Mon
Tue
room
()
RORABACK E.
09:00–10:35
(lecture parallel1)
Wed
Thu
Fri
Date Day Time Tutor Location Notes No. of paralel
Tue 09:00–10:35 Erik Sherman RORABACK
lecture parallel1

The subject is a part of the following study plans