ENGFLM 2000 – The Essay Film

Robert Clift, G26 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays 1:00pm to 4:50pm

This seminar explores the essay film from critical and creative standpoints.  Students make short essay films while also investigating the essayistic as a mode of cinematic expression where fiction, nonfiction, and experimental traditions collide, and where concerns over the subject and its relationship to the social come to the fore. This is an interdisciplinary course, combining both production and theory, intended for students from a range of academic backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives. No prior production experience is required. Hands-on training in audiovisual recording and editing techniques will be provided. 

SPAN 2452/FMST 2341 – Transpecific Media

Junyoung Verónica Kim, 318 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays 6:00 PM to 8:55 PM 

Catalyzed by recent geopolitical and global economic shifts, the transpacific has emerged as a space of intense transcultural movement and exchange, calling into question institutionalized temporal divisions (periodizations), spatial configurations (regions), and disciplinary knowledge formations (area studies) that naturalize the boundaries and sites of the spaces we know as “Latin America,” “North America,” “Asia,” and “The Pacific.” By disrupting the naturalized divisions of East and West (Asia/Americas) and North and South (North America/Latin America), a critical transpacific approach harbors the possibility of redrawing global maps and rewiring how we imagine global connectivity.  In this course, we will explore media approaches to the cultural-political-economic interactions of the transpacific by first examining the ways in which film, video and television engage with transpacific historical entanglements, such as Asian labor migration to the Americas and the transpacific network of U.S. empire (e.g., wars, military bases, nuclear test sites). Second, we will focus on the ways in which these audiovisual texts engage with and refashion dominant tropes, genres, stereotypes/cybertypes and narratives that often gendered and racialized. For instance, by centering the role of everyday peoples in the establishment, contestation and deployment of racial capitalism, imperialism and the Cold War, how do these cultural texts contest the ways in which peoples, lands and waters have been categorized and claimed by imperialist-militarist-capitalist projects? Moreover, how do the biopolitical and necropolitical projects constituted by a racial gendering of peoples and spaces propagate geopolitical projects of empire, war and capitalism? We will address these questions by analyzing several media from various nations and productions across the Pacific that include web videos, Misha Green’s television series Lovecraft Country (2020), and films­ – such as Koreyoshi Kurahara’s Black Sun (1964), Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), Kang Hyeong-chul’s Swing Kids (2018), Tizuka Yamasaki’s Gaijin (1980), and Juan Martín-Hsu’s La Salada (2014). These primary works will be examined in conjunction with theoretical readings on Techno-Orientalism, Afrofuturism, gender construction, racial capitalism, (imperial) militarization, and transpacific migration.