Visual Bodies: From Cinema to New Media

3 points · University catalogue

How is the human body, in its diversity, portrayed on screen ? And how may filmic languages—from cinema to new media—be affected by the multifaceted experience of our embodied dimension ? In this course we will examine the intricate relationship between cinema and the body as a paradigmatic way to study how moving images are seen, made, and experienced today. From a plurality of standpoints (historical, formal, theoretical) and across a wide range of corpus (documentary, fiction, experimental, new media, art cinema), we will ask ourselves how different filmic discourses are able to represent and explore the creative faculties but also the darker sides of the body, its gestures, desires, impulses or drives. We will investigate how they can account for the cognitive, gender, cultural, technological and political revolutions associated with the body throughout history, with a particular emphasis on contemporary contexts of new images, mediascapes, and practices. Focusing on several key-sites of the (post-)modern condition—cosmopolitan/metropolitan experiences, narrative technolo-gies, pluralist (dis-)identifications, tansmedial mobility, immanent temporalities—the course will offer rich critical opportunities to make sense of contemporary bodies via moving images, and vice versa . Theoretical/critical works read in class will include texts by Bergson, Epstein, Pierce, Deleuze, Bellour, Elsaesser, Doane, Lastra… The course is organized around lectures/seminars and film screenings. Students are expected to participate fully by carrying out assessed readings and writing assignments, actively involve in classroom discussions/viewings, and give scheduled oral presentations.