Post-Classical and Post-Modern

To clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism':

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.

Towards a Third Cinema

 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?
Michael Chanan, "The Changing Geography of Third Cinema"

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

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Theory, Psychoanalysis and Gender

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

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

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

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

Still from Kathryn Bigelow's Zero-Dark Thirty (USA, 2012). Jessica Chastain as subject and image.

Cinematic Specificity, Art and Theory: Montage and Realism

On Montage:
Vsevolod Pudovkin, "On Editing" from Film Technique
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" + "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" from Film Form

On Realism:
André Bazin, What is Cinema, Vol. 1
(nb. please only read the essays at pg. 9 and pg. 41: "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" + "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" (aka Montage Interdit).

On the 'art cinema' and modernism in film:
Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
from Poetics of Cinema

Welcome to Summer I

Welcome to Summer I: for this session the blog is exclusively dedicated to the COM210 Intro to Cinema Aesthetics class. Please check back often to find readings, bits of information from across the network
, clips and other sorts of film related goodies.