Syllabus
TIME AND PLACE:Tues. 08.30–11.25, F.A.M.U.Projection Hall first floor (room 124)Lažanský palác, Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Praha 1Mid-term essay due 9 AprilFinal essay due 21 MayStudents also to sign up for one presentationCOURSE DESCRIPTION AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
The aim of this course is to awaken for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these will promote an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality, and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms of “circulation”. The seminar thus draws on, and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of post-war star directors of narrative cinema: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA), (i.e., post-1947 Occidental and Soviet cinema). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus will be evaluated anew. Attention will be given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many forms of utopian thinking and looking. In so doing, we consider arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active and transformative engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought for post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation and circulationism. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be assessed. Film criticism and philosophy, and philosophical criticism, will include texts from Giorgio Agamben (Italy), Nico Baumbach (USA), Jonathan Beller (USA), Walter Benjamin (Germany), Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit (USA), Jan Campbell (UK), David A. Cook (USA), Gilles Deleuze (France), Georges Didi-Huberman (France), Mark Fisher (UK), Fredric Jameson (USA), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Ivone Margulies (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Hannah Patterson (USA), Jacques Rancière (France), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czechia), Nicolás Salazar Sutil (UK), Marion Schmid (France), Steven Shaviro (USA), Bernard Stiegler, (France), Robert T. Tally Jr. (USA), François Truffaut (USA), and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK). All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles. Clips and special features from DVD/Blu-ray discs 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 counter chronological way in order to problematize facile teleological and linear ways of thinking and of reasoning; this will also provide us with a different perspective on the autopoietic development of the cultural system of film.
Material:DVD and Blu-ray videos: see schedule; selections from the following critical and theoretical texts will be available in a course-reader or: will be adduced in the lectures or readings authored by the instructor:Agamben, Giorgio: Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Zone, 2007)._____ . Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (Verso, 2007).Baumbach, Nico: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia, 2019).Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth/New England, 2006).Benjamin, Walter: selected texts from the series of volumes with Harvard Univ. Press to be announced.Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit: Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Harvard, 1993)._____ . Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (BFI, 2004).Bird, Robert: Andrei Rublev. (BFI, 2004).Campbell, Jan. Film & Cinema Spectatorship (Polity, 2005).Casetti, Francesco: Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo (Columbia, 2008).Conrad, Peter: The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and Imagination (Thames & Hudson, 2021).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).Didi-Huberman, Georges: The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, trans. Shane B. Lillis. (RIC, 2018)/MIT, 2018).Docherty, Thomas: Literature and Capital (Bloomsbury, 2018).Durham, Scott and Dilip Gaonkar, With an afterword by Jacques Rancière: Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics (Northwestern, 2019).
Fisher, Mark: The Weird And The Eerie (Repeater, 2016).
Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Canongate, 2005).
Jameson, Fredric: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005). _____ . Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (Verso, 2016). _____ . The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana, 1995).
Kline, T. Jefferson, ed. Agnès Varda: Interviews (Mississippi, 2014).
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, 2000).
Le Fanu, Mark: “Stalker” in The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (BFI, 1987) pp. 92–107.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).
Margulies, Ivone: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Duke, 1996).Morin, Edgar: The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Morimer (Minnesota, 2005)._____ . The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, foreword Lorraine Mortimer (Minnesota, 2005).Morrison, James and Thomas Schur. The Films of Terrence Malick. (Praeger, 2003).Nancy, Jean-Luc: The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, trans. with an intro. François Raffoul and David Pettigew (Albany: SUNY P, 2007).Naremore, James: The Magic World of Orson Welles (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978 reprinted at Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1989).Patterson, Hannah: “Two Characters in Search of a Direction: Motivation and the Construction of Identity in Badlands” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (Wallflower, 2003) pp. 24–36.Rancière, Jacques: Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Berg, 2006)._____ . The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2007).Richards, Rashna Wadia and David T. Johnson: For the Love of Cinema: Teaching our Passion In and Outside of the Classroom (Indiana, 2017).Roraback, Erik S.: a select band of essays adduced below (some published and / or presented at conferences) from a two-volume work that is being prepared for publication.
Working title: Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought.
Salazar Sutil, Nicolás: Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement (MIT, 2015).
Schmid, Marion. “The Visual Artist’s Gaze Agnès Varda’s Intermedial Layering” in Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts (Edinburgh, 2019) pp. 95–105.Shaviro, Steven: The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 2 (Minnesota, 1993).Stiegler, Bernard: Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, 2010).
Tally, Robert T. Jr.: Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-System (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Thomsen, Christian Braad: “The Double Man”, “Bavaria and Hollywood” and “Querelle” in Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (Faber and Faber, 1997) pp. 1–44, 101–10, and 302–11.Truffaut, François: “Foreword” to André Bazin’
Annotation
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The aim of this course is to awaken for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these will promote an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality, and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms of “circulation”. The seminar thus draws on, and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of post-war star directors of narrative cinema: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA), (i.e., post-1947 Occidental and Soviet cinema). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus will be evaluated anew. Attention will be given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many forms of utopian thinking and looking. In so doing, we consider arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active and transformative engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought for post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation and circulationism. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be assessed. Film criticism and philosophy, and philosophical criticism, will include texts from Giorgio Agamben (Italy), Nico Baumbach (USA), Jonathan Beller (USA), Walter Benjamin (Germany), Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit (USA), Jan Campbell (UK), David A. Cook (USA), Gilles Deleuze (France), Georges Didi-Huberman (France), Mark Fisher (UK), Fredric Jameson (USA), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Ivone Margulies (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Hannah Patterson (USA), Jacques Rancière (France), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czechia), Marion Schmid (France), Nicolás Salazar Sutil (UK), Steven Shaviro (USA), Bernard Stiegler, (France), Robert T. Tally Jr. (USA), François Truffaut (USA), and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK). All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles. Clips and special features from DVD/Blu-ray discs 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 counter chronological way in order to problematize facile teleological and linear ways of thinking and of reasoning; this will also provide us with a different perspective on the autopoietic development of the cultural system of film.