SPECIAL TASKS AND ASSIGNMENTS / WEEK 9-12

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November 12:

In "Towards a Third Cinema," Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino critique the role of bourgeois art and intellectuals in neocolonial contexts. They also challenge any attempt to copy Hollywood or auteurist traditions in order to develop anti-imperial strategies.

  • "Just as they are mot masters of the land upon which they walk, the neo-colonialized people are not masters of the ideas that envelop them . . . . The intellectual is obliged to refrain from spontaneous thought; if he does think he generally runs the risk of doing so in French or English--never in the language of a culture of his own which, like the process of national and social liberation, is still hazy and incipient. Every piece of data, every concept that floats around us, is part of a framework of mirages that it is difficult to take apart." (48)
  • In bourgeois culture, the "world , experience, and the historic process are enclosed within the frame of a painting, the same stage of a theater, and the movie screen; ma is viewed as a consumer of ideology, and not as the creator of ideology." (51)

To what extent do these quotes explain the predicaments of the protagonist of Memories of Underdevelopment? What kind of visual and aural strategies does Thomas Alea use in order to portray the social and cultural position of the film's anti-hero? Please have a close look at these two clips:

How do these sequences depict Sergio? What does he do? Why? How? How does the film define his relation to the surrounding world? And how does the camera position us as a viewer? What does all this say about the hero's commitments, passions, ideas?

November 5:

  • Werner Herzog's Aguirre has often been read as a film either exposing Western colonialism or providing an allegory for German National Socialism. If so, how does this critique work? How is it carried out? Have a close look at the following three clips and think about these questions: How does public history enter the story of Aguirre? How is history being represented? What does it mean "to produce history as others produce plays"? What is the signficance of historical documents, of writing and recording, in the film? Who writes and for what reason? And how does Herzog, in these three clips, articulate the relation of the visible, the written, and the spoken? How does he have his characters act?
  • "Taking a close look at what's around us," Herzog claims about the jungle in this clip of Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, "there is a sort of harmony, it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder, and we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound like badly pronounced and half finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order." How does Herzog's philosophy of nature relate to what we see in Aguirre? Does it support or contradict the film's view of colonial history? Does it provide a normative framework in order to assess historical developments such as colonialism or fascism?

October 29:

  • A different kind of cinematic temporality: Liv Ullman's face, slowly merging with the dark.
  • In an early scene of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, we see and hear the doctor diagnosing Elizabeth Vogler's "sickness." How does Bergman stage this encounter? Can we trust the doctor's interpretation? Can we use this as a key to the ensuing drama? Or does it lead us astray?
  • Have a very close-frame by frame-look at the opening images of Persona. What is the function of this prelude? What kind of symbols does Bergman offer us here? What kind of themes does this prelude anticipate? What kind of images are chose for what purpose? How and where does all this position the viewer?
  • What would Dogme 95 say about Persona? What would Bergman say about Dogme 95? (Dogme Manifesto | Dogme "Vow of Chastity")

October 22:

  • Please have a close look at the following sequence of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. To what extent and how does this sequence challenge what David Bordwell defines as classical narrative cinema? According to Bordwell's definition, in classical cinema "narrative form motivates cinematic representation. Specifically, cause-effect logic and narrative parallelism generate a narrative which projects its action through psychologically-defined, goaloriented characters. Narrative time and space are constructed to represent the cause-effect chain. To this end, cinematic representation has recourse to fixed figures of cutting (e.g., 180 continuity, crosscutting, "montage sequences"), mise-en-scene (e.g., three-point lighting, perspective sets), cinematography (e.g., a particular range of camera distances and lens lengths) and sound (e.g., modulation, voice-over narration). More important than these devices themselves are their functions in advancing the narrative."
  • Take a close look at the cutting, setting, cinematography, and sound choreography in this sequence. Exactly what makes these look different than what we see in "classical cinema"? How do they challenge dominant conventions? Do they support or resist the narrative construction of time and space? How do these devices position or address the viewer in front of the screen? And how do they succeed in achieving art cinema's quest for greater realism and psychological verisimilitude?

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