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GER 355 - German Cinema: Expressionism - German silent cinema is renowned for its stylistic experiments. This interdisciplinary approach to German Expressionism in 1920s film, visual art, and theater will enable students to critically engage with questions of stylization in film. Students will acquire a vocabulary of film analysis and learn how to interpret film from a historical and theoretical perspective. No knowledge of German required; readings and discussions in English.
GER 222 - Voices of Dissent: From Hitler to Hollywood - German Refugees and American Film - Expelled as illegal immigrants or outrun by Hitler’s advancing armies, tens of thousands of refugees were on the run on the European continent before around 1941/1942 most escape routes had finally been blocked. Among them were also many of the approximately eight hundred mainly Jewish filmmakers, artists and intellectuals, including director Billy Wilder, actor Peter Lorre, author Heinrich Mann and composer Arnold Schönberg, who would eventually make it to Hollywood. Many got involved in anti-Nazi activities, supporting fellow refugees, educating the American public about Nazi atrocities and lobbying for America’s entry into the war in Europe. Ironically, many could only make a living by taking on Nazi roles in wartime movies—impersonating the very barbarity they themselves had fallen victim to. No knowledge of German required; readings and discussions in English.
CINE 399 - Dangerous Dames: Women in Film Noir - The films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s brought forth a new image of the woman: strong, intelligent, enigmatic, exciting, but also dangerous, destructive and deadly. The archetypal femme fatale of film noir rejects the conventional roles of devoted wife and loving mother and uses her sexual attractiveness and cunning to manipulate men in order to gain power, money and independence. In this course, we will explore the femme fatale fantasy in quintessential films noirs such as Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1945), Out of the Past (1947) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and study the formal and narrative construction of these dangerous dames as well as their social implications.
CINE 399 - Billy Wilder - Writer-director Billy Wilder is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age. Through close readings of world-famous films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), we will explore Wilder’s range from gentle ethnographer of modern life to caustic satirist of American society and the culture industry. In addition, we will consider his uneven relation to Hollywood genres, his systematic blurring of boundaries between comedy, romance, and drama.
GER 407/507 - Gesamtkunstwerk: The Total Work of Art - The unprecedented success of the 3D epic Avatar recently forcefully demonstrated that the irresistible allure of being entirely absorbed by an aesthetic experience is simultaneously hermetic and diaphanous, self-contained and boundless. Originally conceived as a romantic reaction to an increasingly fragmented and dissociated world, the utopia of the integrated artwork first gained momentum when Richard Wagner applied the concept to his envisioned revolutionary music theater. Wagner anticipated a collectively produced "Artwork of the Future", modeled after ancient Greek tragedy, that would unite all art forms into one creative expression of the people and their religion. The notion of the gesamtkunstwerk subsequently served as a theoretical basis for the fin de siècle theater reform movement, which in turn helped to establish the theater production as an autonomous art form. Both the theater's struggle for artistic autonomy and the director's claim to auterism have their direct parallel in film history. From its earliest stages film contested the stage's alleged position as the privileged site for the integrated artwork, developing its own strategies for "totalizing" aesthetic effects. Ideologically, both in theater and film, the notion of the gesamtkunstwerk has come to be perceived as a quintessential tool for totalitarian mass deception. Yet the notion of a holistic multimedia experience has enthralled artists and theorists of all political stripes up to the present, either as a goal to be achieved or as a foil against which to propose alternative responses. Thus thinkers in the Brechtian tradition have sought to construe the various arts within the multimedia artwork as a cluster rather than a synthesis, facilitating critical distance instead of enforcing immersion. Readings and discussion in English. |