111-487 Avante-Garde Film, Modernity and Desire

Credit Points

Coordinator

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This course will explore the relationship between modernity, psychoanalysis and film with emphasis on the avant-garde. It will briefly examine the early history of the cinema and its origins in other new visual forms of modernity such as photography, 19th century visual devices such as the diorama, zoetrope and viviscope. The main emphasis will be on the way in which modernity shaped the cinema and the way in which the cinema influenced aspects of modernity. Particular reference will be given to the writings of Freud and related aspects of modernity such as: the shock of the new, desire, the optical unconscious, the double, the uncanny, war and horror, misogyny, hysteria, depersonalisation, the body and nostalgia. Finally the European avante-garde will be compared briefly to developments in contemporary avante-garde cinema. Films studied will be selected from Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Un Chein Andalou, The Seashell and the Clergyman, Blood of a Poet, L'Age D'or, Metropolis, The Student of Prague, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Pandora's Box, M, Bed & Sofa, Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshoma Mon Amour, India Song.

Assessment

Written work totalling not more than 6000 words