Moving Pictures and a Changing Society

Catalog description

American society has evolved dramatically over the last century while retaining distinctive ideals and social tensions. Rural communities have given way to digital worlds, pork barrel politics to polarization, and fixed conceptions of sexuality to fluid ones. At the same time, the country is marked by a longstanding celebrity culture, frontier mindset, and enduring conflicts around class, race, and gender. The course seeks insight into complex patterns of social change through the lens of film. Each week we watch a movie made in a given historical period, and read from the sociological literature of that period. The course travels about a decade per week, covering films from the Silent Era up to the present, watching films such as Modern Times (1936), Double Indemnity (1944), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The President's Analyst (1967), Taxi Driver(1976), She's Gotta Have It (1986), American Beauty (1999), District 9 (2009), Her (2013).