ENG 5138 Spring 2022 Parker

In symbiotic relation, the cinema and modernity can be seen to operate as points of reflection, re-production, and convergence. The film medium allegorizes major concerns of modernity, especially when paying special attention to modernity as indicative of a change in experience, determined by artificiality and the concept of re-production, and defined in/as/through movement. We will interrogate the re-production of mythologies on screen borne from a particular lineage of nineteenth-century culture and modernity, including concerns of the perpetual mimesis of woman mechanized and fetishized by the camera’s lens, the question of the artificial at all costs, and the very movement inscribed at the heart of modernity and its “moving pictures.” In the course, we will start with the founding myths indexed in early cinema and then aim to theoretically investigate the mythology of the cinematic apparatus itself.

Writers and (film) theorists we will study include André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Jean Epstein, Lucy Fischer, and Tom Gunning. Units of study may focus around the following: “Cinema and the Ruins of Modernity,” a study of early cinema and its Egyptological obsessions; “Electric Eve,” the meeting of electricity and mythology with German expressionism; “Montage, Mechanism, and Movement,” a look at early Soviet cinema and Vertov’s kino-eye; “Sculpting with Light, and Dance,” focused on early cinematic experiments in dance films and the linkage to the plastic arts and the fetishization of the female performer; “Flaneur/Flaneuse,” paired French New Wave films from both masculine/feminine perspective; and “Vertiginous Movement,” an analysis of noir/anxiety films in relation to central questions of movement, reproduction, and urban spaces.