ENG 765: Screen Culture CSAP
This seminar will explore theories and methods in contemporary screen culture. As film studies gained credibility in the 1970s alongside and in conversation with cultural studies, psychoanalysis, semiology, and feminist studies, film scholars began to develop and refine theories and methods for working with and understanding the medium. In part, this first wave of scholarship was intended to distinguish film studies, as an academic field, from literary studies. Film scholars of this era pointed to a history of film theorizing by filmmakers and thinkers from the early Soviet filmmakers to the French critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s; these scholars developed sophisticated theories of the gaze, apparatus, formalism, and film semiotics, as well as philosophies of film. Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 80s, a first wave of television studies, which had always had a stronger sociological bent than film studies, began to emerge. This course will begin with these early conversations in academic film theory before delving into a range of theories, “anti-theories,” and methods that began to proliferate in a “post” film studies era that, owing to developments in digital film technology and screening practices that blur the lines between film, television, and new media, is more often characterized as media studies and/or screen studies.
Our focus in the main part of the course will be on film/media texts and contemporary scholarship centered on U.S., Asian, and Pacific screen cultures. We will read widely in screen studies as we watch film and media ranging from early Hollywood to U.S. network television, postwar Japanese cinema, contemporary independent Black film, New Queer Cinema, contemporary South Korean cinema, contemporary Thai cinema, Māori media, and the Hong Kong New Wave. In particular, we will consider how questions of race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, sexuality, and nation give shape to film/media scholarship, as well as how scholars draw both from film theory and fields such as critical race studies, area studies, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies in order to build their arguments. We will read scholarship by film and media scholars such as Homay King, Michael B. Gillespie, Quinlan Miller, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Earl Jackson Jr., Anna McCarthy, Eliza Steinbock, Daisuke Miyao, Kristen Warner, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Richard Dyer, Linda Williams, Patricia White, B. Ruby Rich, Hye Seung Chung, and Miriam J. Petty. In this part of the course, students will begin to hone their skills working with film/media theories and methods as they refine their film/media objects and research and write, in different discursive registers, about film/media. Simultaneously, through a series of visits by invited guest speakers, students will be introduced to film/media professionals working both in and outside of the academy. Visitors will likely include a senior film/media scholar, a film journalist, and a PhD candidate specializing in film/media.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Develop an understanding of major developments and contributions in film/media studies from the late 20th century to the 21st century;
A stronger ability to undertake advanced critical analysis in both written and oral formats;
A stronger ability to undertake advanced research methods related to screen studies and to prepare an essay for submission to an academic journal;
Develop a complex understanding of the origins and consequences of cultural interpretive frameworks based on concepts of identity and subjectivity, at varying discursive scales.
Writing Requirements:
One longer research paper (15 pages, double-spaced) with a clearly-defined methodology that makes a significant contribution to film/media studies; in preparation for submission to a film/media journal;
Leading one seminar discussion, 30-40 minutes, accompanied by a 600-700 word post on Laulima;
One film/television review (700-1000 words) suitable for publication in a mainstream, non-academic outlet.
Readings/texts include:
Selections/chapters from Film Theory and Criticism; A View from the Bottom; Film Blackness; Dance and the Hollywood Latina; Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History; New Queer Cinema; Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change; Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability; The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aoteorora New Zealand; Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema; Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood; Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier; and assorted essays.
Film/media will likely include Imitation of Life (1934); Now, Voyager (1942); Blade Runner (1982); Happy Together (1997); Pirated! (2000); Te Rua (1991); Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001); Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003); Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2011); Medicine for Melancholy (2008); A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960); The Bob Cumings Show (1955-1959).