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Graduate Film Theory Seminar
200 001 | CCN: 26044
Damon R Young
Location: Dwinelle 226
Date and Time: TH 10:00am - 12:59pm
4 Units
In this course, we will read key works of film and media theory from the past 100 years, spanning theories of aesthetics, subjectivity/spectatorship, and mediation. We will situate these works in the context of the larger intellectual movements that they emerged from and contributed to (including phenomenology, Marxism, structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, queer theory and critical race theory). A primary focus of the course will be on cinema, as a dominant representational form and cultural technology of the 20th century. But we will also examine more recent theories of television, digital media, and media broadly conceived that destabilize some of the assumptions of classical and post-structuralist film theory. Throughout the course, we will attempt to place theorists in conversation with one another and examine how the theorization of moving-image forms has been central to the analysis of aesthetics and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to the point that a study of modernity without a theory of film and media is virtually inconceivable.