Women's Cinema, Women in Cinema: Visual Pleasure, Narrative and Feminism

To accompany the screening of Agnes Varda's Vagabond:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here. Make sure you have this read by next class. We will be discussing Godard's Masculin/Féminin in relation to the ideological critique of the institutional mode of representation put forward by the various cinematic new-waves as well as Vagabond as a feminist text that takes off on that critique but adds sexual difference and the representation of gender to its concerns. Laura Mulvey's essay should be a key to navigating these concepts.

Stills below from Otto Preminger's Laura and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look."

Take a picture of her.

Film Theory: Postmodernism

To clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' this is Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" -- As you read it relate it to the screening of Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and be prepared to discuss the film in terms of its postmodern qualities.

Third Cinema, Third Theory?

Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."
--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema
Med Hondo, What is Cinema for us?

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST


The assignment for your second and final paper will be handed out during class.

Feminist Film Theory

To accompany Welles' The Lady From Shanghai as well as Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle:

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Reality

"2 or 3 Things: a machine that morphs the colliding meanings of words and objects with dazzling speed, and generates an astonishing array of metaphors, paradoxes, digressions, and, above all, dialectical relationships, between idea and action, word and image, sound and picture, interior and exterior, microcosm and macrocosm. The swirling surface of a cup of coffee is transformed into the primordial ooze and also the infinite universe; two women in a café look at a magazine from different angles, but the collaged and cartooned female faces and bodies on its pages are degrading from any perspective."

Barthes, "The Reality Effect"
McCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses"
McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure"

Abercrombie, Lash & Longhurst, "Popular Representation: Recasting Realism"

Montage Theory: Caught Between the Soviet Union and Hong Kong

The 'dream sequence' in John Woo's The Killer (Hong Kong, 1989)

Vsevolod Pudovkin, "On Editing" from Film Technique
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" + "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" from Film Form
David Bordwell, "Plots: Slack and Stretched" from Planet Hong Kong

The 'Odessa Steps' sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (USSR, 1925)
referred to in the "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" article above.

Realism in the Cinema

Bazin's collection of articles on neo-realism from What Is Cinema?; Vol. II
Merleau-Ponty, Preface to Phenomenology of Perception
Kracauer, The Found Story and the Episode from Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
Below you will also find, embedded, Bazin's 'The Virtues and Limitations of Montage' from What is Cinema?; Vol I --click on the Google Books logo at the bottom of the frame and a new tab will open with a more comfortable page size for reading.

The Classic Realist Narrative Text

The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, USA, 1953)

David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures"
Tom Gunning, "The Big Heat: Circuits of Corruption"

Welcome to Spring 2010