World War I in Film: The World made Modern Credits: 3

Catalog description

This cluster course examines World War I and its legacy through the lenses of international history and film studies. It explores the origins and conduct of the "Great War," as it was called at the time, as well as its transforming effects on the modern international relations and the ongoing process of globalization. It also examines how the war spurred the growth of an infant motion picture industry, and how movies produced during the decades that followed helped shaping popular memories of the conflict-reflecting and shaping cultural discourses regarding the myth or reality of modern civilizational progress; the ethics of modern weaponry; the individual's placed in mass society; constructions of class, race, and gender; and the meaning of national identify in a globalizing world. The class will draw on selected history texts and an array of films and film clips.