ENGFLM 2455—Film and Media Historiography

Mark Lynn Anderson (Mondays 6:00–9:50) 

Film history has a history, and this seminar engages that history to consider a range of methodologies, problems, and possibilities in the research and writing of film and media history. Our considerations of various contemporary debates in film and media historiography will be informed by a return to earlier works in the discipline in order to gain an appreciation of the continuities and discontinuities of film historical discourse and practices. While the primary sources for the seminar are principally drawn from the first one hundred years of North American film historical writing, many of our readings in the philosophy of history and in film and media historiography will have relevance for the histories of other cinemas, as well as for the histories of other media. Film history’s relation to social history will also be central to our discussions, as we consider how sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and national identity have determined the institutional development of the American cinema and the international film industry. Students are instructed in methods of archival research and are required to develop and conduct original research on a film or media historical topic of their choosing.

ENGFLM 2457—Ethnographic Film and Media

Neepa Majumdar (Wednesdays 6:00–9:50) 

From Tarzan and King Kong to fashion and décor, popular culture has long capitalized on the lure of the exotic. This fascination with the Other has been central to the politics of colonialism and the science of ethnography, which in turn have shaped the audiovisual and narrative framework of the ethnographic imagination of the moving image, whether in visual anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork, or cinema in general, affecting questions cultural representation and knowledge production that arise from intersections of ethnography and film. In considering the ethical and epistemological implications of how anthropologists and documentary filmmakers construct other cultures, the course will begin with a grounding in a history of ethnographic cinema, then move on to a broader scope of theoretical inquiry, including forms of popular and everyday ethnography that have accompanied anthropological practice since its inception. In addition to problematizing distinctions such as science and entertainment, authenticity and hybridity, ethnographic authority, and non-fiction and fiction, the course readings and films will also address issues such as the relation between anthropologist and subject; ethnographic film spectatorship; identity tourism and salvage ethnography or the “disappearing” Other; colonial and anthropological knowledge; auto-ethnography; and “imperialist nostalgia.” Forms of ethnographic filmmaking to be considered will include classic ethnographic films, pop ethnography, indigenous filmmaking, and forms of poetic, experimental, self-reflexive, and participatory ethnography.