Cinematic Imagination: Music, Media, and Modernity

Catalog description

Do new media change the way we think and perceive the world around us? What does it mean to live in an era after film has reshaped our capacity for documentation and visual expression? In order to explore such fundamental questions, this course focuses on artistic developments during the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berlin became a vibrant cultural center after World War I. As the emergence of German film provided new aesthetic principles of artistic production and reception, traditional art forms such as literature, theater, painting, photography, and music were reframed by a new "cinematic imagination." Engaging with the work of cultural theorists who first witnessed the impact of film, photography, radio, and gramophone, the course also explores recent interdisciplinary scholarship in media studies to understand how new technologies shape social and political concerns. A hands-on film project allows students to explore Abu Dhabi's urban cityscapes to create a remake of Walter Ruttman's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a City. How can this reflection on modernity and modernization in 1920s Berlin help us understand the cinematic imagination's mediation of urban spaces today?