Summer Session II 2011
A new Critical Approaches course: COLL-C 103 14338 Contemporary World Cinema (carries A & H distribution credit) (3 cr.) Prof. Justyna Beinek, Slavic Languages and Literatures 4:00-6:00PM MW Class meetings 6:15-8:15PM MW Film Screenings
This class will explore some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful international feature films of the past decade.
We will watch movies that come from around the globe and represent countries from France, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, and Spain to Poland and Russia to Japan to South Africa to Mexico and Argentina. We will learn how to approach films critically in academic and "private" movie-watching contexts; we will discuss different ways of analyzing movies and will interpret class films from various theoretical standpoints.
The films' thematic concerns range from the depiction of everyday life in present-day South Africa (Tsotsi, dir. Gavin Hood, 2005) and India (Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan, 2008) to communist East Germany (Lives of Others, dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006); from an analysis of sources of violence and terror (The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke, 2009) to a meditation on respect for the dead (Departures, dir. Yojiro Takita, 2008); from the tragic yet life-affirming Holocaust story (The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski, 2002) to the buoyant "make-feel-good" movie about love in Paris (Amélie, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) to a unique art project that consists of a 90-minute uninterrupted shot of the Hermitage gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia (Russian Ark, dir. Alexander Sokurov, 2002).
We will talk about the possibilities and limits of cinematic representation of cultures, nations, historical events, social issues, abstract ideas, collective and personal memory, gender, ethnicity, and/or private/public realms. We will analyze various movie genres:
drama, fantasy, comedy, literary adaptation, thriller, and others. We will discuss distinctive cinematographic styles that characterize contemporary world cinema. As we analyze films, we will also define our analytical criteria and basic film theory terms. To this end we will reflect on the aim of movie criticism, the difference between opinion and evaluation, various elements of film (narrative, characters, plot, point of view, mise-en-scène, composition, image, and sound), main critical approaches to film criticism, and ways of writing about film.
