Film Theory: From Classical Film Theory to the Emergence of Semiotics

Readings from earliest film theory through the emergence of cinema semiotics, with awareness of contemporaneous filmmaking and underlying philosophical and ideological tendencies. Some key issues: cinematic specificity and relations to other media; the politics of cinema; filmic representation and the real; cinema, modernity, and modernism; mass culture debates; cinema, language and signification. Readings drawn from Adorno, Arnheim, Balázs, Bazin, Benjamin, Bergson, Debord, Eco, Eisenstein, Epstein, Kracauer, Lukács, Merleau-Ponty, Metz, Munsterburg, Pasolini, Sartre, Wollen, etc. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors and graduate students.