107-095 Film, Modernity and the Avant-Garde

Note

Availability

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Admission to fourth year Honours in Cinema Studies see Honours Entry

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This course will explore the relationship between film, modernity, and 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. 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. The European avante-garde will be compared briefly to developments in later avante-garde cinema. The subject will introduce a practical component in which students will make a short film using only the technology that would have been available to filmmakers working in the silent period. The aim of this projects is to assist students in their understanding of the essential nature of early cinema. Films studied will include: Nosferatu, Blood of a Poet, L'Age D'or, Metropolis, The Student of Prague, Pandora's Box, Last year at Marienbad, India Song, Sunless.

Assessment

Written work totalling 10,000 words.

Prescribed Texts

A Course Reader will be available.

• L Charney & V R Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. University of California Press.