Cinema & Beyond

This course will provide students with the critical apparatus and the conceptual means necessary to articulate the ongoing shift from mechanically based cinematographic media to the new digital forms. We will read key critical texts alongside film, new media and the Internet in order to delineate their changing social and cultural functions. A medium already indelibly marked by technology, cinema's continuing technization by digital technologies will alter the very meaning of cinema, a transformation that reflects the fundamental changes going on in other cultural spheres. In order to understand these aesthetic and technical shifts we will be examining the depiction of technology by cinema and technology's effects upon it.

Specific topics covered will include The Internet and the WWW, the impact of computers on cinema and the New Economy taking shape in response to the web based technologies. In the cultural sphere, we will be Investigating Cyberpunk, Post-Fordism, and Post-structural theories of reproduction and information. Readings will include texts by Walter_Benjamin, Baudrillard, William_Gibson, Jameson, McLuhan, Avital_Ronell and Paul_Virilio as well as more recent writings on the technical, aesthetic, and political implications of the New Media. Among the films to be discussed: Metropolis, a Face in the Crowd, A_ClockWork_Orange, Blade_Runner, The_Conversation, Videodrome, Terminator_II, RoboCop, Strange_Days.

Take-home midterm exam and final paper required.

The first course reader (of two) will be available by Wednesday at University Copy Service, 2425 Channing way--through the second passage.
 
 

Aug 23 : Introduction to the course, discussion.
 
 

Aug 30: Cyborgs and Technology

Reading:

Max Weber: "Science as a Vocation"
Donna Haraway: "Cyborg Manifesto" (Chapter 8 of Simians, Cyborgs & Women)

Film:      RoboCop / Verhoevenandportions of Modern Times / Chaplin
 

Sept 6:   Labor Day Holiday!
 

Sept 13: The Individual & Human/Machine Interfaces

Reading:

Claudia Springer: " The Pleasure of the Interface" (Screen 32:3, Autumn 1991)
Kaja Silverman: "Back to the Future" (Camera Obscura, 1991 Sep, N27:108-133)
Begin Reading Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Film:      Blade Runner / Scott

Sept 20 : Ideology, Fetishization & Commodification

Reading:

Marx: From Capital Vol.1
Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Supplemental: Joel Snyder: "Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura"

Sept 27: Administration and Rationalization:

Reading: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: "The Culture Industry" in Dialectic of Enlightenment

Film: Clockwork Orange / Kubrick

Oct 4: The Spectacle:

Reading: Society of the Spectacle / Guy Debord

Film:  A Face in the Crowd / Kazan

Oct 11 : Repetition, Industrialization, Technization of Perception and the Machine Age

Reading:  Walter Benjamin: "Some Motifs on Baudelaire"
Film:      portions of Modern Times / Chaplin, and Eraser Head / Lynch

Oct 18: **** Take Home Mid-Term **** In Class REVIEW of course thus far.
 

Oct 25: Technology and Society

Reading: Habermas: from Toward a Rational Society --"Technology and Science as "Ideology"" and "Modernity--An Incomplete Project."

Film:       TBD

Nov 1 : Postmodernism

Reading:

Jameson: from Postmodernism: introduction and essays, also Jameson: from The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Andreas Huyssen "Mapping the Postmodern." (All essays in Reader)

Film:     Videodrome / Cronenberg

Nov 8 : Post-Fordism

Reading:

David Harvey, from The Condition of Postmodernity and skipping the Baudrillard excerpts--Simon Clark: "The Crisis of Fordism or the Crisis in
Social-Democracy," and essays from Socialist Review on Post-Fordism (All essays in reader).

Nov 15: Simulacra

Reading:   Baudrillard--Simulations and selected portions from Baudrillard excerpts (in reader).

Film:        Portions of various films depicting "Virtual Reality."

Nov 22:  The Internet and the New Economy

Reading:  TBD

Nov 29:  Informal meeting and conclusion. Discussion of final papers.