FILM 47.37 Cinema and Modernism, High and Low

This course explores film history’s tumultuous relationship to modernism, the twentieth-century Anglo-European aesthetic trend that irrevocably transformed global concepts of “art.”

Beginning with the explosive arrival of film on the “science as entertainment” scene in the 1890s, the course will trace film’s multiple identifications with modernism through the past century, from Dadaism and surrealism in the 1920s through post-World-War-II American avant-garde cinema and the French New Wave of the 1960s. To guide us through these film-modernism encounters and their consequences, we will investigate key critical and theoretical debates about the uses (and misuses) of “high” art cinema and commercial narrative film for inciting political change, from André Breton’s surrealist manifesto(es) and the studies of modernity and mass culture undertaken by the Frankfurt School in Germany to the “Screen theorists” in the French and British academies in the 1970s, right up to more current debates about the resonance between “classical” Hollywood film product and the ardently experimental, even anti-narrative ambitions of post-1968 cinematic avant-gardes.

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:ART; WCult:W

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Film and Media Studies