Courses

This course investigates film in its first half century, c.1895-1945, as both product and producer of the modern: as a technology that itself reflected the conditions of modern life; and as a medium that continually tested, negotiated, and contested modernity’s effects. Early film theorists sometimes treated film as a mere extension of theatre. Bernard Shaw wrote that, with the arrival of film, “we shall hear no more of the fugitive fame of the actor’s art, [for] all the theatres will be picture theatres, and all the plays immortal.” Early film pioneer Georges Méliès said that his central cinematic aim was to create “stage effects.” But others proclaimed film radically new. “The more a scene is theatrical, the less it is cinematic,” wrote the expressionist Kurt Pinthus in 1914.

We will look at the kinds of theatrical effects Méliès and others sought to replicate: the use of poses, pictorial composition, and mises-en-scène borrowed from the stage. At the same time, we will examine the specifically “cinematic”: film’s fracturing of classical time and space; its fragmentation of the body; its erotic simulacrum of intimacy; its reflection of the anonymity of the metropolis; its ghostliness. We will investigate its particular version of modernism—forged in the encounter between avant-garde aesthetics and mass culture—looking at it in relationship to literary and other aesthetic forms of modernism. And we will explore its reflections of the modern: ideas (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, sexology...); aesthetic movements (futurism, expressionism, surrealism...); the world (the electric cityscape, air travel, fascism, global war).

At the center of our work together will be the development of methodologies for the close reading and watching of film: as narrative and verbal text; and as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic text. We will read early film theory alongside academic criticism and film journalism, paying close attention not only to our critics’ claims but also to their critical strategies. While treating these as possible models (or counter-models) for academic criticism, film journalism, or broader “public humanities” writing, we will also use them as tools for deepening our understanding of film as medium, of modernism, and of modernity.

Application instructions: Please email Professor Peters <[email protected]> basics (program, year), a few sentences about why you’d like to take the course, and a brief description of relevant past experience (previous courses, film work, etc.)