This course will provide an overview of significant movements, debates, and figures in film theory. Readings will span both classical and contemporary film theory, addressing a range of approaches including realism, structuralism, auteur theory, genre criticism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist and critical race theories, third cinema, film-philosophy, and new work on digital cinema. The class will examine writings on cinema in their historical and national contexts, looking at the ways in which film theory intersects with political, cultural, and aesthetic trends. Class discussions and written projects will focus on close analysis of both written and filmic texts, and students will be required to view films each week outside class.
Course Requirements:
Discussion Leading (10%): Students will sign up to lead our discussion of the reading assignments each week. Formal presentations are welcome, but not required. Clips, questions, and other outside materials are encouraged. This will be infinitely more successful if discussion leaders can share some of their ideas and materials on the class blog for the rest of us to reflect on before class. Since there are so many readings, it is fine to pick a selection to focus on.
Blog & In-class Participation (20%): The success of this class will be ride on our collective discussion of the theoretical texts. To encourage this, I’d like to extend our in-class conversations online. All participants in the class will be signed up for a shared class blog, where we can post questions and ideas about all things film theory. My hope is that all of our discussions, real and virtual, will be prolific, productive, and organic. For those who might need prodding, I’d ask for a bare minimum of two substantive posts/comments before the midterm, and two after.
Students can opt for one of two options in terms of the writing assignments for this course. Option one:
2 short papers (8-10 pages), closely analyzing one (or a small selection) of the texts from the class. These papers will count for 70% of the final grade
Option two:
One longer research paper (20-25 pages, worth 70%) due at the end of the semester. Topics for the final paper MUST be pitched in advance, in a proposal with bibliography.
Readings: Assigned readings will be available as pdfs on our course website (see above).
Recommended texts for further contextual background:
***Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 7th Ed. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford, 1976)
Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000)
All outside screening films are available on reserve and via Netflix
THE AUTHOR FUNCTION
How, then, can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the author function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals?
In reflecting on the concept of “author” it would be useful to approach Foucault’s author function in his seminal essay, What is an Author? In this essay Foucault questions our most basic assumption that there must be an author. We see authorship with specificity and believe an author to be an individual, whose work transcends with this specificity attached to it. For Foucault the “author function” is not a person, and is not to be confused with either the “author” or the “writer.” The “author function” is a set of cultural constructions or assumptions governing the production, circulation, classification and consumption of texts. The author function, according to Foucault is decisively linked to the legal system that controls the written production and, as a legal system, it is forbidden to transgress its limits. Foucault further complicates this issue by questioning the very notion of the attribution of authorship. And this has to do, not with the act of writing itself, but with notions and styles that dictate if an ouvre should be attributed to one particular individual or another. Therefore, for Foucault, the “author” is not an individual but a narrator, a particular narrator “functions” within a set of cultural and social constructions. In such a way, an author does not have to be an individual; the author could be an alter ego that narrates in a certain way. This is clear in many films by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar in which characters portrayed as authors use pseudonyms, share authorship and in which writing triggers a catalytic event. The writers in these films are transgressors and their transgression is what eventually forces them to make decisions related to their own writing. The “authors” in these films are faced by predicaments that question the very authority of their written production as they transgress the limits imposed and, as a consequence, they are either forced to renounce to the very act of writing or, recognize the inexistence of a sole author and come to terms with a different set of rules that attribute the authorship of a written product.
The Flower of My Secret is for example a film decisively about the act of writing and about the author function. The film moves through and successfully connects different genres: theater, romance novels, journalism and film. But it not only connects these genres, it also visits the behind the scenes elements of a successful production, whereas it is in the publication of a romance novel, in the publication of a daily newspaper or in the production of a theatrical dance production. The writer in this film is Amanda Gris a successful writer of romance novels who publishes five romance novels a year and every release is received with enthusiasm by the public. Posters in the street announce the latest novel and newspaper reviews are planned. However no interviews are possible because nobody knows who she is. Amanda Gris is a mystery. Amanda Gris is a pseudonym. Amanda Gris is Leocadia Macías. When Leo’s own personal story changes the mood of her writing changes and thus, Amanda Gris’ signature changes as well. The problem is that Amanda Gris’ books have become objects of consumption; a name regulated by a publishing house and she has become a product that is expected to deliver a certain signature, which is regulated by a contract, by a market out of the control of the “real” writer. In a series of events the writer assumes a second pseudonym that writes against the first pseudonym creating and author against an author and against the authorial self. In a series of complicating events the author slowly disappears in the process and the author function remains. The writing subject disappears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH7MNctj_4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSUHmfbtCZs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TIDthcIHU
In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), a writer who is dead, who is also a narrator talking to us after the fact, who narrates a story in which he reflects on the attitudes and place of silent film diva Norma Desmond and in which he also reflects on his personal experience as a writer, in various acts of writing and its implications and, also, on a specific knowledge – that of the film industry and how its constant transformation affects the lives of several individuals. Who is then really talking? In Sunset Boulevard, madness, insanity, murder and death conclude the creative process.