sCourses - Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema - Concordia University - Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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PhD Course Descriptions 2011-2012

FMST 800/3 A (Fall and Winter)

Proseminar

Title: Film and Media Studies: Issues in Disciplinarity

Room: EV 6421

Time: Thursday, 13:15 – 17:15

Instructors:  Martin Lefebvre and Masha Salazkina

The first part of the Pro-Seminar taught by Martin Lefebvre offers a forum for discussing problems of disciplinarity with regards to the study of film and cognate areas. The central objective is to sensitize Ph.D. students to problems facing film studies disciplinarity as part of their training. The course will be divided into two unequal sections: Part I: Film Studies Looks at Itself: Some Historical Developments; and Part II: The Idea of Disciplinarity: Institutional, Cultural, Epistemological Issues.

The second part of the Pro-Seminar taught by Masha Salazkina will address several recent developments in film and media scholarship. We will look at the ways the field has recently challenged some of the assumptions about its object and subsequently expanded its historical methods focusing on three issues: 1) challenges to the national/Eurocentric mode (transnational and transcultural approaches, cinema of small nations, etc); 2) concepts of expanded cinema, micro cinema and screen studies, and 3) the "sonic turn" in film and media studies. We will then access the impact of these developments on the instructional materials, curriculum development, and institutional and research structures relevant to the field.

 

FMST 801B/4 A (Winter)

Walter Benjamin’s Historiography and Film Studies

Room: H 333

Time: Wednesday, 13:15 – 17:15

Instructor: Catherine Russell

This PhD seminar explores the critical historical tools that are provided by Walter Benjamin’s historiography. The focus of the course will be on Benjamin’s contribution to film studies and on how film studies scholars have historically used and interpreted his work. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources, and readings in film studies that have been influential in the interpretation of his writing. A prominent theme of the course would be the notion of modernity theory and its role in the rethinking of film history by scholars such as Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg and Tom Gunning. The course will explore key terms in Benjaminian vocabulary such as “aura”, “flaneur”, “dialectical image”, “phantasmagoria” and “optical unconscious” in terms of their philosophical and theoretical definitions in Benjamin’s writing, and their subsequent deployment in film scholarship. The course will include a wide variety of film screenings, including examples of Weimar, Soviet, American and French cinema contemporary to Benjamin’s own time of writing; and more eclectic examples of American avant-garde cinema and Hollywood as texts that might benefit from Benjamin’s conceptual apparatus.

 

FMST 802B/2 A (Fall)

In Moving Colour: Perception, Movement, Affect and the Cinematic Image

Room: H 333

Time: Wednesday, 13:15 – 17:15

Instructor: Erin Manning

Through a very close engagement with a small body of films and a close reading of primary philosophical texts (Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze), this course will explore the ramifications – for a theory of images – of the idea that we never perceive an image as such. Further, we will explore the added complication brought forth by cinema: the fact that the image-content is itself always moving. Through an engagement with theories of time, movement and memory, we will explore, for instance, questions such as “how is time directly perceived in the image?” (Deleuze). “How is the edging-in of a perceptual event spurred by memory”? (Bergson) “How is perception a process? (Whitehead).

This course will take these very complex starting points as a way to begin to speak about images in their dynamic singularity. We will explore, in detail, the concepts of perception, movement and affect, in order to draw from an existing philosophical vocabulary that is increasingly being used in film studies.


 
 
 

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