Celluloid Deaths

Catalog description

Exploring major themes in film theory, aesthetic theory, affect theory, queer theory, and post-colonial theory, this course asks the question, why do movies matter today? What does cinema have to do with life—and with death? From the operations of the cinematic apparatus (incorporating a process of mechanical indexicality that employs a shutter to block out light as often as it opens to it) to the marginalized, overlooked stories and audiences to which cinema connects us, film, an inert object, animates us upon its projection. Movies about multiple kinds of deaths and filmic representations of deaths—including social death, archival absences, labor exploitation, and killing—are the focus of this course. Yet we might be enlivened by cinema as well; understanding the complex situation of films within capitalism allows us to envision opportunities for subversive participatory spectatorship.