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Walter Benjamin
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…
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Epistemologies of the Archive
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…
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American Cinema of the 1950s
Topics in Film History: American Cinema of the 1950s. 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.…
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Barbara Stanwyck: Hollywood Gender and Genre
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. Because she was not tied to any single studio, her career offers…
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Melodrama in Art and Film
Melodrama will be discussed on a number of different levels in this course: as a genre, as a meta-genre, and as a theoretical orientation. We will explore a range of theories of melodrama, including those of Peter Brooks, Mary Anne Doane and Thomas Elsaesser. Melodrama incorporates a wide variety of stylistics and aesthetics, and has…
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