ENGFLM 2453 Film History and the Non-Theatrical
Mark Lynn Anderson, 512 Cathedral of Learning, Wednesdays, 6:00pm to 9:50pm
Over the past three decades, film studies has witnessed a substantial increase in published research into the production, circulation, and uses of motion pictures distinct from the international commercial cinema that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term “non-theatrical” now describes a widely recognized but unwieldy array of film materials and practices that encompasses the histories of experimental cinema, amateur film, educational and sponsored films, medical imaging, media installations, porn, home movies, military reconnaissance, and law-enforcement surveillance. Scholars’ attention to the histories of the non-theatrical has made it clear that our standard film histories were. and continue to be, highly restricted in their consideration of moving-image culture, privileging the type of object that is at the basis of what Christian Metz identified as “going to the movies,” the fictional narrative film.
This seminar surveys the emergence and development of “the non-theatrical” within film and media studies to consider if and how this work has challenged the guiding assumptions and objectives of our discipline and the ways in which the study of non-theatrical moving images might contribute to a radical rethinking of the commercial cinema.
ENGFLM 2695 Horror Film
Adam Lowenstein, 407 Cathedral of Learning, Tuesdays, 1:00pm to 4:50pm
The Academy Award nominations bestowed on Get Out and The Shape of Water in 2017 are a recent sign of a phenomenon that has been gaining momentum steadily over the last forty years: the recognition that horror films need to be taken seriously as contributions to art, culture, and politics. Observing the state of research on cinematic spectatorship in 1995, the film scholar Linda Williams noted “how analysis of a supposedly exceptional genre – the horror film – may end up offering the most comprehensive analysis of gender and sexuality in spectatorship in general.” The deluge of scholarship on the horror film since 1995 not only bears out Williams’s prediction and signals the emergence of horror studies as a field in its own right, but teaches us over and over again how a genre often assumed to be an exception to core debates in film theory and film history winds up illuminating foundational assumptions about cultural studies in general and film and media studies in particular. This seminar will investigate the key films and critical discussions surrounding the genre from its beginnings to the present, but not merely to perform a genre survey – instead we will use horror as a lens to ask wide-ranging questions about spectatorship, theory, history, aesthetics, and politics that have shaped and continue to transform film and media studies in profound ways. The seminar will be enhanced by special events organized by Pitt’s Horror Studies Working Group as well as access to Pitt’s Horror Studies Archive in the University Library System’s Department of Archives and Special Collections.
ITAL 2701 At the End of the World: Films of the Apocalypse
Alberto Iozzia, 1325 Cathedral of Learning, Thursdays, 11:30am to 1:25pm
With particular attention to Italian authors (Antonioni, Cavani, Ferreri), but also exploring productions from elsewhere (Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, von Trier), At the End of the World is a study of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema that invites students to contextualize and reinterpret the apocalypse as a post-modern metaphor. Taught in English, the course focuses on a transnational range of films where the apocalypse is either explicit or implicit: we will watch and analyze films built around spectacular disasters and visually striking catastrophes, as well as productions that explore the intimate consequences of a collapsing interiority. Employing theoretical tools such as Ernst Bloch’s non-simultaneity and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s free indirect subjectivity, this graduate seminar will offer a novel interpretation of horror and science fiction films and examine their relevance both to the socio-historical context that produced them, and to our own.
SPAN 2452/FMST 2341 Contemporary Latin American Film: Queer Diaspora
Junyoung Verónica Kim, TBD, Tuesdays 6:00pm to 8:55pm
Situated at the intersection(s) of queer studies, diaspora studies, critical race theory and media studies, this course deploys queer diaspora as a critical methodology through which to explore the dynamic connections between biopolitics (race-gender-sexuality), geopolitics (imperialism, settler colonialism, racial capitalism), and aesthetics (affect, art, film). By mobilizing queer/ing as an epistemological analytic rather than an ontological category, this course calls attention to the ways in which the term queer signals life and death questions of apprehension and value production: how one signifies or how groups of living beings are made to signify (or signify otherwise) within a given set of significations. How can queer/ing diaspora challenge notions of patriarchal heteronormative reproduction, as imagined in ideas of kinship, lineage, and belonging, which function in dominant conceptualizations of diaspora? That is, how might a queer lens unearth alternative practices and conceptions of space (nation, family), time (history, lineage), and embodiment (race, gender, disability)? Moreover, what are the ways in which sexuality is integral to notions and processes of citizenship, nation, state, land, diaspora, home? By focusing on film, visual culture, and media, this course explores the ways in which queer diasporic aesthetic practices allow us to draw alternative cartographies, center South-to-South connections, and interrogate and complicate the economies of feeling (e.g. nostalgia, loss, gratitude, attachment) that structure our understanding of diaspora(s). We will examine the diasporas that are imagined through the following cartographic sites – the Americas, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Transpacific (Asia-Latin/America), the Black Atlantic, Afro-Asia, Global Asias, etc. – by analyzing several media from various locations and productions that include videos by Richard Fung, Steve McQueen’s television series Small Axe (2020), Justin Chon’s and Kogonada’s television series Pachinko (2022), and films, such as Aurora Guerrero’s Mosquita y Mari (2012), Fatih Atkin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007), Hong Khaou’s Monsoon (2020), and Daniel Kim’s documentary Halmoni (2017). Theoretical and critical texts will be culled from Amitav Ghosh, Sara Ahmed, David Eng, José Esteban Muñoz, Gayatri Gopinath, Keguro Macharia, Kara Keeling, C. Riley Snorton, Ella Shohat and others. This course will be taught in English.