Cinema and Modern Life

Undergraduate

This course will propose a historical overview of French cinema, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between cinema and the idea of the modern or modernity. How was cinema perceived as a modern, technological art? How was cinema positioned in relation to utopian and dystopian visions of industrial capitalist modernity? How did cinema contribute to these visions? To respond to these questions, this course will examine texts and films associated with many of the most important cultural, intellectual, and political movements in twentieth-century France: socialism, communism, anarchism, naturalism, surrealism, modernism(s), poetic realism, Left Bank cinema, the New Wave, cinéma vérité , formalism, le cinéma du look , postmodernism(s).