Cinema and Globalization

Catalog description

This course explores how films reflect (and in some cases attempt to explain, promote and memorialize) the emergence and transformation of global social phenomena. Through course readings, students will become familiar with key texts on globalization produced by social scientists and cultural theorists, and will link those key texts to a diverse array of cinematic representations of various global actors, issues, institutions and processes, as well as historical and theoretical interpretations and debates on globalization. The course introduces students to the work of internationally recognized film directors (for example, Euzhan Palcy, Jia Zhangke, Stephen Frears, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or Majid Majidi) and studies of globalization (by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Guy Standing, Saskia Sassen, John Tomlinson, Robbie Robertson), and asks students to link scholarly perspectives with the visual rhetoric of cinema artists.