Vision, Representation and Cinema (FILM 432)

2020 Spring
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Film Studies(FILM)
3
6
Asuman Feride Suner Zontul asuman.suner@sabanciuniv.edu,
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English
Undergraduate
--
Formal lecture,Interactive lecture
Communicative,Discussion based learning
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CONTENT

Cinema is the art of the 20th century. Though its birth goes all the way back to the 19th century it is, in this long century that cinema has been the medium of high and low art, the medium of propaganda and popular culture. The show and entertainment business of the last century and the consumer culture came out has both contributed to and benefited from the cinema. On the other hand, cinema has transformed the visual culture dramatically as a matter of visuality. It is after the introduction of the movies of the 1920s that human understanding of visuality has taken a radical shift as a consequence of cinema's relation to various aspects, such as psychoanalysis In this regard cinema might be taken as the basic art of the past century with none of the realms of art and social life being ignorant to it. The course will expose the students to the reality both produced and transformed in cinema. Each week a certain field, such as history, politics, psychoanalysis, gender, marginality, will be selected and accordingly films will be analysed to find out how the reality of that specific area is represented. On the background the students will discuss and analyse the basic concerns and concepts of modernity. The course, in this context, will conjointly survey the history, problematics and arts of the past century as well as the adventure of cinema as a technique and art.

OBJECTIVE

Constructing coherent and independent arguments based on the critical evaluation of the theories on modernity, visuality and cinema
Developing basic film analysis

LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • Understanding the development of new forms of visuality in the context of the 19th century modernity Understanding the development of the film form in the context of the 19th and early 20th century modernity Developing a critical understanding of the development of film language Developing a critical understanding of cinematic representation

ASSESSMENT METHODS and CRITERIA

  Percentage (%)
Quiz 40
Term-Paper 40
Participation 10
Presentation 10

RECOMENDED or REQUIRED READINGS

Readings

Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I.B.Tauris, 2007.
David Sterritt, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Michel Chion, The Films of Jacques Tati. Toronto: Guernica, 2003.
Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice ed. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.