The Coen Brothers: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The Big Lebowski. No Country for Old Men. Fargo. For over 35 years Joel and Ethan Coen - a. k. a. the Coen Bros. - have been busy crafting their own enigmatic and idiosyncratic oeuvre that incorporates slapstick comedy, Judaism, dark humor, pastiche, nihilism, irony, and the meaning of life. This upper-division seminar examines their creative filmmaking partnership by analyzing the majority of their Hollywood projects. In particular, we will deconstruct their narrative strategies by attending to their creative choices regarding editing, cinematography, lighting, mise-en-scène, etc., and we will examine their films? major thematic concerns. We will also discuss how their work complicates auteur theory and genre theory as theoretical frameworks for understanding film authorship that defies easy definition and categorization.