Cinema and Revolution: A Global Perspective

This course provides a critical introduction to the history and theory of revolutionary cinema. Students will be exposed to a range of filmic modes and textual practices that mediated the political idea of revolution, including such celebrated movements as Soviet formalism, Surrealism, 60s Counter Cinema, and Third Cinema. We will investigate the role of film in the revolutionary renewal of life, the dialectic of repetition and emergence that structures revolutionary temporality and the modernist work of art, the compulsive drive to reconstruct revolutions as cinematic events, and the political antagonisms that prevent the revolutionary project from achieving representational closure.