World Film History

Catalog description

Focusing on various cinematic movements, trends, and regional/national cinemas throughout film history, this course allows students to examine from various angles the connection between historical and cinematic developments. From early cinema, German Expressionism, the Soviet Montage, various new wave movements signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism, to contemporary movements such as Iranian New Wave, Taiwanese New Wave, and Korean New Wave, we will follow diverse cinematic trajectories from around the globe, as well as their interconnectedness. The goal is to cover a broad historical, cultural, thematic and stylistic range, but also to explore longer, pre-cinematic histories of regional and national traditions, and their connection to other artforms (opera, theater, painting) that had profound influence on the evolution of cinematic medium. The history of cinema will thus be approached as an intermedial history, which tends to blur the divides between old and new media, theatrical, painterly and photographic, foreign and national styles, conceiving of art in its hybrid and “impure” manifestation. We will also explore numerous ways the medium of film has played an active role in, narrated, and shaped history. Finally, we will examine how the concept of “world cinema history” gets shaped as a discursive construct, determining both major and minor cinematic flows. By tracing both dominant and peripheral trajectories and cinemas, we will see how “placing the film on the map” accounts for structural (in)equality and reveals gendered, racial, ethnic, economic and political nature of transnational processes in world cinema.