The Aesthetics of Political Cinema: Montage, Political Modernism, and Beyond

Catalog description

In the 1920s, Russian filmmakers with political concerns blended mass cinema and innovative avant-garde and modernist filmmaking styles. Their most famous filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, elaborated his concept of montage to explain his ideas of cinema. This course will examine the heritage and strategies of political filmmaking which draws on modernist aesthetics, beginning from the montage filmmaking of the 1920s. Some emphasis on 1920s-30s and 1960s-70s, but not limited to those years. Work by filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Brecht, Ivens, Capra, Godard, Marker, Oshima, Bertolucci, Tavianis, Kluge, Fassbinder, Akerman, Rainer, Mulvey, Solanas, Hondo, Gerima, M.Moore, Oppenheimer, and/or others.