Although the term and the theory entered into Film Studies scholarship as a genre grounded in European culture and American cinema, melodrama is clearly evident in many international film traditions. In this course we will look at the ways that the term has traveled and how melodrama has manifested in different cultures as an expression of social injustice, gender inequity, and an affective bridge between private and public desires and repressions.
Acting and Performing are notoriously difficult to talk about because they are elusive and always enmeshed in storytelling, technologies, collaboration, and of course costume and miseen-scene. This course aims to help students talk and write about film acting, which is often a matter of finding the right vocabulary and identifying the performative aesthetics in any given media.
Walter Benjamin was a prolific writer, whose corpus spans a wide range of genres, from philosophy, to criticism, to autobiography. A small cottage industry has developed around Benjamin’s extensive writing, producing an ongoing stream of interpretations, applications, and contextualizations. A host of different “Benjamins” have arisen, depending on the great variety of analytical frameworks and disciplinary concerns. Benjamin’s difficult life in interwar Europe as a nomadic character on the fringes of so many cultural circles is very much part of his philosophy, and cannot be entirely separated from his critical theory. Benjamin worked on the edge of a political precipice, and adapted methodologies from a wide range of cultural currents, expressing himself eloquently in French and German, providing a significant challenge to his English translators. He challenges the film critic and media analyst to craft new avenues of interpretation in order to recognize the utopian within the ideological, and to illuminate the lost promises of technological modernity.
Filmmakers have been raiding the archive for decades, making new work out of old. The aesthetics of this practice are extremely varied, and have undergone several phases of revision with new technologies and new artistic practices, not to mention different archival sources. In this class we will survey the history of this practice as it has evolved since the 1950s, and into the digital era.
Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in decline, even while it produced some of the strongest films of its history. With the rise of independent productions, the competition of TV, and major shifts in the social fabric, American cinema was dramatically changed during this decade.
This course will explore the history of American cinema from the early 1930s to the early 1960s, tracing the career of Barbara Stanwyck who made 84 films from 1927 to 1964, and worked with many of the top directors, in many different genres.
In this course, Melodrama is discussed on a number of different levels: as a genre, as a meta-genre, and as a theoretical orientation.