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 What is the signficance of historical
documents, of writing and recording, in the film?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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