Class time and place:
Tues. 08.30–11.25, F.A.M.U. in the projection hall on the first floor, Lažanský palác, Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Praha 1

Faculty:
doc. Erik S. Roraback, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
Docent, Habilitation: Charles University, Faculty of Arts; Director, American Literature and Cultural-Studies, Charles University; FAMU-International, 2003–present; Affiliate Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2019–present; University Visiting Research Fellowship, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK 2014–23; Visiting Scholar, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2015–19; Visiting Researcher, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany 2004–14; Visiting Professor, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France 2005; Doctor of Philosophy and College Tutor (Magdalen College and Mansfield College), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Oxford/École Normal Supérieure Exchange, Paris, France; Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholar, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Bachelor of Arts, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA; Pomona College Program (dir. All Souls College, Oxford) at University College, Oxford/Stanford University Centre in Oxford; University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Contact:
e-mail: erik.roraback@famu.cz or erik.roraback@ff.cuni.cz

Individual web site:
www.erikroraback.com

Office hours:
After seminar and by appointment; to be announced, Room 219c, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Jana Palacha 1/2, Prague 1

Objectives:
The aim of this course is to awaken for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetic, 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 postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), and Orson Welles (USA). 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 utopian forms of 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 engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be given critical coverage.

Critical and theoretical literature engaged will include film aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy from Theodor Adorno (Germany), Giorgio Agamben (Italy), Nico Baumbach (USA), André Bazin (France), 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), Owen Hulatt (USA), Fredric Jameson (USA), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Hannah Patterson (USA), Jacques Rancière (France), Josh Robinson (USA), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czech Republic), Nicolás Salazar Sutil (UK), Steven Shaviro (USA), Bernard Stiegler, (France), François Truffaut (France), and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK). Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt (USA), inter alia, will also be engaged. All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles. Clips and special features 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 an unorthodox counter chronological way in order to undercut overly facile teleological ways of thinking and of reasoning; it will also provide us with a different perspective on the development of the cultural system of film.

Programs:
FAMU-International; CDM: e.g., CDM Digital Media, CDM2, CDM2 Scriptwriting, CDM3; CET/Film Production; CIEE; DAMU Arts Management; DAMU Directing; Free Mover; Photography; PTS; ERASMUS-FAMU/HAMU/Charles University; Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory (core course) and American Literature and Cultural Studies (elective course) (Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University).

Course Requirements:
To receive credit for the seminar students must
1) have no more than two absences out of the thirteen total weekly sessions; for each absence beyond one your course grade will be lowered a full letter grade; arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that full session.
2) give one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s) for that week
3) submit a mid-term essay and
4) produce a final essay.

Final essay (3000 words; due 21 May): 30%,
Mid-term essay (1500 words; due 9 April): 20%,
Oral presentation: 20%,
Attendance and participation: 30%.

Essay topics will be distributed at least three weeks before they are due.
Arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that session. During class time, mobile phones are to be off and computers may be on for note-taking only and not for doing work online.

Weekly Schedule:
13 and 20 February: American Neo-Noir and the American Sublime
Pre-film lecture and screening:
Badlands (1974, 95 min., dir. Terrence Malick); The Thin Red Line
(1998, 170 min., dir. Terrence Malick)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: J. Morrison and Thomas Schur: The Films of Terrence Malick.
(Praeger, 2003) pp. 59–67.
H. Patterson: “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.
E. Roraback: Revised version of an essay first presented as “The
Dialectic of Cinema and Silence; or, Forms and Structures for
Moving Across Badlands (1974)” at the Olomouc International
Symposium on American Studies, ‘America in Motion’, 7–10 September
2008, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia. Current title: “Cinema
and Silence; or, Forms and Structures for Traversing the Riches of
Malick’s Badlands (1973).”
E. Roraback: Revised version of “Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red
Line (1998) and Circulating within the Heideggerian Cinematic
Image” first presented as a guest lecture on the invitation of
prof. Ludwig Nagl, 16 May 2006, Philosophy Dept., Universität Wien,
Austria. Current title: “Rewinding Malick’s The Thin Red Line
(1998) and Moving within the Neo-Heideggerian Image.”
27 February: The Chantal Akerman Phenomenon
Je Tu Il Elle (I You He She, 1974, French with English subtitles, 86 minutes, dir.
Chantal Akerman)
Rdgs: I. Margulies: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist
Everyday (Duke UP, 1996). PP. to be announced.
E: Roraback: “Forms of Creaturely Capital; or, Akerman’s Je Tu Il
Elle (I You He She, 1974)“.
5 March: Das Neue Kino: Fassbinder (New German Cinema)
Pre-film lecture and screening:
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten,
1971, German with English subtitles, 88 minutes, dir. Rainer Werner
Fassbinder)
Rdgs: D. Cook: A History, pp. 582–604.
E. Roraback: “Keep to Your Dreams: Fassbinder’s Movements of
Cinematic Intensity”.
C. B. Thomsen: “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.
Will discuss: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, German with English subtitles, 940
minutes, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder), inter alia.
12 and 19 March: Soviet Cinema, Icon Art and the Medieval
Pre-film lecture and screening:
Andrei Rublev (1966, R