| 01 | M-W-F-- | 1:00P-2:00P | Cupples I / 215 | Allen | May 10 2017 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 15 | 14 | 0 |
Desc: | Description for Spring 2017: Madness and the Image in French and Francophone cinema: This course explores the nature of psychic experience as expressed by the cinematic medium, which in itself has been considered by many social historians to be symptomatic of the alienated and "neurasthénique" mindset of life under industrial capitalism, from the first half of the twentieth century (Simmel, Benjamin, Freud and his followers) to more contemporary philosophers such as Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. The power of the image to at once mirror the unconscious and captivate a passive audience has been found both marvelous and terrifying. This class will explore film's radical potential to effect social change (or reinforce conformity) through its particular hold on the viewer. We will explore ways in which mental normative and pathological states are represented, and specifically the ways in which film is better equipped than other aesthetic genres to convey intense emotional and subjective experiences. We will examine how the representation of madness and mental deviation has changed over the course of cinematic history (from "monstrous" to more humanized), and in what ways film has contributed to a questioning of "civilized" states of health and illness similar to those expressed by avant-garde groups such as the Surrealists and the Situationists. Films studied might include: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires, Abel Gance's J'Accuse, Carné-Prévert's Le Jour se lève, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour, Julien Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, Michel Haneke's Amour, and several films by Luis Buñuel. The course will begin with a historical and theoretical discussion of film as "deviant" medium, and will include a reader with excerpts from the above-mentioned writers and philosophers. |
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