If any of you are looking for courses to fill your summer schedule, Professor Garry Leonard in English sent me these interesting course offerings for you to consider. Will


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SUMMER CLASSES: DATE/TIME/DESCRIPTIONS

C83, Wednesdays 10-1
ENGC83Title: The Imperial Imaginary in Cinema

An exploration of how the representation of travel, adventure, conflict, and formation of identity in the "adventure film" of Western culture promotes, preserves and sustains mythologies of "whiteness" and (European) "masculinity" as the focal point of knowledge, desire and power in an idealized fantasy of Western culture. From the image of King Kong gripping the Empire State Building, to the loyal but doomed Gunga Din, to Harrison Ford spying on "savage" rituals in the Temple of Doom, the construct of the "white" explorer or soldier has depended on a counter-image: the exotic, inscrutable, treacherous, unpredictable native or "other". We will look in whole and in part at examples of "World cinema" (Iranian, Brazilian, African)to show what we mihgt call "altermative scopic regimes" as we become sentitive to how the domian of visuality gets politicized: who gets to look, at whom, who is visible, at what price? How are "sight lines" policed? breached? erased? Lukd Skywalker hides from "the Empire" in "savage" surroundings, only to emerge by steaqlth, attack and retreat. Hero or Terrorist? What visual strategies and narrative techniques devise the hero and/or the terrorist? Films include: Gunga Din, Star Wars, Fight Club, Safe, Blood Diamond (USA); The Harder They Come (Jamaican); City of God (Brazilian), Darwin's Nightmare (documentary); Black Girl (African); Battle of Algiers (Italian/Algerian) Ten; Kandahar (Iranian); Paradise Now (Palestinian); Hot House! (Israel); Turtles Can Fly (Kurdish); The World (Asian) Guru (Indian)

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ENGB76H: Cinema and Modernity I: Romance, Horror, Science Fiction (B76h)
Thursdays, 5 to 8pm
(The companinon course to ENGB75, Cinema and Modernity: Melodrama, Film Noir and the Western)

A study of how cinema emerges against the backdrop of modernity, as both an art form and a mainstay of popular culture through its formulation of different genres. In this course, we will explore how genre creates a narrative space where historically contingent pressures can be renegotiated and the viewer realigned with ideologically satisfying discourses about such presumably natural notions as “ true love” (in the Romance) or “ physical and mental inegrity in a godless world” (in horror) or "how technology has altered our humanity" (in Science Fiction).

In the "Hollywood Romance" the vexed notion of "True love" is a mythology about an oasis free from the frustrations and betrayals of everyday life in the Matrix of modernity. The genre traces the difficult path from negotiation to intimacy, the trimuph over anonymity, the defeat of substitutability. We look at the evolution of the concept of marriage from one of preservation to production. Films to view include: It Happened One Night, The Graduate, Pretty Woman, Lost in Translation Horror shows the body as a site for competing discourses in modernity: psychological, sexual, social, economical, etc. Monsters become symptoms of irrevocable choices and unresolvable dilemmas. Films include: Dracula, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, and Saw. Science Fiction tries to identify indecipherable problems and corruptions in the ongoing "project" of modernity by projecting this project all the way out to its "logical" solution. Ironically, a genre that trades in concern for the future, Science Fiction is the most dystopic of all the genres. It asks athe question: "what makes us uniquely human, and how has technology altered this essential humanity?" It also suggests our concern should not be with the "latest technology", but why we pursue technology, to the exclusion of all else, to solve our problems. Films include: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, The Matrix, V is for Vendetta, Children of Men.
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(companion course: B75):
A study of how cinema emerges against the backdrop of modernity, as both an art form and a mainstay of popular culture through its formulation of different genres. In this course, we will explore how genre creates a narrative space where historically contingent pressures can be renegotiated and the viewer realigned with ideologically satisfying discourses about such presumably natural notions as “ courage” (in t he Western) or “ morality” (in Film Noir) or “ success” and “ family” (in melodrama). In melodramas from the early t wentieth c entury (D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms), the 1940s (Bette Davis in Now Voyager) and the 1980s (Fatal A ttraction ), the family is in constant danger of dissolution due to various (modern) forms of seduction and betrayal in the fields of economics, power, and desire. Looking at Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece M, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, the Coen Brothers ’ Blood Simple, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, we will observe how Film Noir explores anxieties endemic to the performance of “ masculinity” and concerns itself with money, career, moral dilemmas, and the femme fatale. Viewing John Ford’s Stagecoach, moving to the 1950s with High Noon and concluding with Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver, we will explore the Western as a genre of national mythology, suggesting why America was formed, why it had to be formed that way, and what must be remembered and acted upon when it seems in danger.