week one 1/19  "CAMP"

 week two  1/24  JOUISSANCE

 week three  1/31  PLAISIR

 week four  2/7  GENRE

 week five  2/14  STAR IMAGE

 week six  2/21  APPARATUS

 week seven  2/28  ***WRITER'S CHOICE***

 week eight  3/7  FETISHISM

 week nine  3/21   REAL/IMAGINARY/SYMBOLIC

 week ten  3/28  THE MALE GAZE

 week eleven  4/4  RACE

 week twelve  4/11  SOUND

 week thirteen  4/18  PAPER TOPICS   

 week fourteen  4/25  MINIMALISM

Any introduction to the broad topic of "film theory and criticism" must inevitably confront the problem of the written text. At its very surface, theoretical writing on cinema (or any other art form, for that matter) can come across as excessively difficult, cryptic and at times impossible to read and comprehend in any useful way. Indeed, its very vocabulary, sentence structure and endless references to obscure scholars and films create a kind of hermetic seal, as if to deliberately elude our grasp and discourage our attempts to know.

While it would require many more than fifteen weeks to examine all the major theories of cinema, this course is designed to help you to decode certain fundamental aspects of film theory--explaining, through a series of focused lectures and group discussions, a selection of key terms and concepts which any serious filmmaker or film scholar should understand. Though terms such as "disavowal and fetishism," "signifier and signified," "the male gaze" and "suture" may mean little or nothing to you at present, by the end of the semester you should have gained some sense of the meanings, applications and limitations these critical keywords. The goal of this course will be neither mastery nor even fluency in any specific theory, but instead the establishment of a basic working knowledge of several important schools of thought--a knowledge which will hopefully whet your appetite for future research, and at the very least allow you some means of entry into texts and films which would otherwise have seemed insurmountable.

Though the nucleus of this course will be a series of weekly critical and theoretical readings, you will at the same time be presented with a series of difficult and provocative films--works of cinematic art which will serve as a testing ground for each week's theories. As you will see, each screening has been deliberately chosen for its innovation, either inside or outside the Hollywood system. Like the texts you will be reading, these films have the ability to amaze and intellectually satisfy a viewing audience, but also the potential to agitate, disconcert, and stun--at times transforming the passive act of viewing into an active confrontation.

As we wade into this difficult semester, my best advice would be for you to concentrate not on the numerous aspects of film theory which you don't understand, but to determine just exactly what is it that you do understand. Starting with this single firm foothold, I think you'll be surprised how much you can ultimately grasp.

Film and Theory: An Anthology
by Robert Stam, Toby Miller
Blackwell Publishers, 1999

The Pleasure of the Text
by Roland Barthes
translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang, 1975