Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image

F.A.M.U., Fall Semester 2005

 

 

Erik S. Roraback

B.A., Pomona Coll.; Rotary Scholar, Univ. of Western Australia; Oxford exchange student, École Normale Supérieure-Paris; Ph.D., Univ. of Oxford; Visiting Prof., Univ. de Provence (Aix-Marseille-1); Adjunct Prof., Vermont Coll. Union Institute & Univ.

 

E-mail: erik.roraback@praha1.ff.cuni.cz or erikroraback@hotmail.com 

Time and Place: Thurs. 14.00-17.05, F.A.M.U. in Room 3 on the second floor, Lažanský palác, Smetanovo nábøeží 2, Praha 1.  First of thirteen sessions 22 September + OPTIONAL VIDEO SERIES ON AMERICAN FILM NOIR, 1944-1958

Office hours: After seminar and by appointment.  Additional hours at Charles University to be announced.

Special program: FAMU International (F.A.M.U.); Intercultural Studies (English and American Studies, Charles Univ.); Film Studies (Film dept., Charles Univ.); Suffolk Univ. Program (Charles Univ.); ERASMUS (Charles Univ.); Institute of Philosophy and Religion (Charles Univ.).

 

Objectives:

This seminar is a select examination of seven major films in pre-1950 Euro-American film history with special emphasis given to those cinematic moments that might teach and train us in new non-dominatory viewing strategies, in new creative ways of circulating, and in new nonsadistic ways of engaging with the most essential element of the cinema: the image.  Film criticism and film philosophy from Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit, Gilles Deleuze, Siegfried Kracauer, Erik Roraback, and Steven Shaviro will be used toward this end.  All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles.  Clips and special features from the DVDs will also be shown.  The course is conducted in English. 

 

Material:

 

DVD and VHS tapes:  see schedule

 

Selections from the following critical and theoretical texts will be available in a course-reader or will be adduced by the instructor in the course:

           

Barber, Stephen: The Screaming Body (Creation, 1999).

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit: Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Harvard, 1993).

Conrad, Peter: The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles (Faber & Faber, 2003).

Cook, David A.: A History of Narrative Film (Norton, 1996).

Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara                     

Habberjam (Minnesota, 1986).

_____  .  Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota,

1989).

Kracauer, Siegfried: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film

(Princeton, 1947).

Lambert, Gregg: “Cinema and the Outside” and “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with

Gilles Deleuze” in Flaxman, Gregory, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minnesota, 2000).

Roraback, Erik S.: a select band of essays from a work in progress, Destroying the Cinema: Welles and

Others.

Shaviro, Steven: The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 2 (Minnesota, 1993).

Truffaut, François: “Foreword” to  André Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical View (Acrobat, 1978), pp. 1-

27.                        

 

Assessment:

To receive credit for the seminar students must: have no more than three absences, give one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s) for that week, submit a mid-term essay and a final essay. 

Final essay (3000-4000 words): 40%, Mid-term essay (2000 words): 20%, Oral presentation: 20%, Attendance and participation: 20%.  Students from Charles University who cannot make the first two classes will have the opportunity to attend makeup sessions.

 

SNAPSHOT:

“As a revolutionary, [Orson] Welles, like Pan, was necessarily a vandal.  Early on, he developed the habit of demolishing hotel rooms or restaurants.  William Herz, a colleague in the Mercury Theatre, remembered an episode at the Ritz-Carlton in New York in the late 1930s, when Welles systematically trashed all the rooms on a floor.  The manager next morning presented him with a bill for forty thousand dollars worth of damage.  In December 1939 in Hollywood, he broke off his collaboration with Houseman by hurling dish heaters at him in Chasen’s, incidentally setting the restaurant’s curtains alight.  He filmed himself in action when Kane meticulously tears apart the bedroom of the wife who has deserted him […]

            These rampages were a complaint against the stubborn, resistant nature of reality.  They allowed Welles to return to that malleable state before anything was fixed, before forms and rules were imposed on us […].”

--Peter Conrad in The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles (Faber & Faber, 2003).

 

Weekly Schedule:

 

Thursday 22 September: German Expressionism and the Socio-Economic

Pre-film talk and screening:        

                          The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924, silent with English  intertitles, 91

                          minutes, dir. F.W. Murnau).

29 September:            Post-film lecture/discussion on The Last Laugh

Readings:          L. Bersani and U. Dutoit: Arts of Impoverishment pp. 1-9.

                        D. Cook: A History of Narrative Film, pp. 115-23.

S. Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, pp. 99-106.               

          E. Roraback: “The Social and the Negative: F.W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The

                           Last Laugh)”.

                        S. Shaviro: The Cinematic Body, pp. 255-69.

Clips:                Nosferatu (1922, dir. F.W. Murnau).

6 October:      German Expressionism, the Political & the Heroizing Epic I

Pre-film talk and screening:

                          The Ring: Siegfried (Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, 1924, 143 minutes, German

                          intertitles with English subtitles, dir. Fritz Lang).

13 October:    German Expressionism, the Political & the Heroizing Epic II

Pre-film talk and screening:                               

                          The Ring: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1924, 148

                          minutes, German intertitles with English subtitles, dir. Fritz Lang).

20 October:    Post-film lecture/discussion on Die Nibelungen (The Ring)

Readings:          D. Cook: A History, pp. 113-15.

                        S. Kracauer: The German Film, pp. 91-97.

                        E. Roraback: “The Politics of Filmic Adaptation: Lang’s Die Nibelungen (The Ring)”.    

Clips:                Intolerance (1916, dir. D.W. Griffith).  

27 October:    Silent Film and the Close-Up

Pre-film lecture and screening:  

                        The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928, 82 minutes,                                           

                           French intertitles with English subtitles, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer).

3 November:   Post-film lecture/discussion on The Passion of Joan of Arc

Readings:          S. Barber: The Screaming Body, pp. 5-32.

                        D. Cook: A History, pp. 372-73.

                          E. Roraback: “Cinema and Spiritual Life: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The

                          Passion of Joan of Arc)”.

Clips:                Sherlock, Jr. (1924, dir. Buster Keaton); The General (1926, dir. Buster Keaton).

 

Mid-term essay due at the beginning of class of 10 November

 

10 November:  Silent Soviet Film, Dialectical Montage and the Camera-Eye

Pre-film lecture, screening and post-film lecture/discussion:                     

Man with a Movie Camera (1929, 68 minutes, Russian intertitles with English subtitles, dir. Dziga Vertov).

Readings:          D. Cook: A History, pp. 133-35.

                        G. Deleuze: pp. 39-43 in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.

E. Roraback, “Self-Reflexive Cinema: Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera”.

Clips:                The End of St. Petersburg (1927, Russian intertitles with                                                                       English subtitles, dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin).

17 November: Orson Welles, American Film & the Advent of the Time-Image

Pre-film lecture and screening:              

                        Citizen Kane (1941, 119 minutes, dir. Orson Welles).

Clips:                Grand Illusion (1938, French, German and English with English sub-titles, dir. Jean Renoir).

24 November: Post-film lecture/discussion

Readings:          P. Conrad: selections from The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles.

D. Cook: A History, pp. 391-420.

G. Deleuze: Cinema 2, pp. 98-155.

E. Roraback: “Cinema Against Cinema: The Orson Welles Hit Parade”.

Brief clips:        The Lady from Shanghai (1948, dir. Orson Welles); Touch of Evil (1958, dir. Orson Welles).

1 December:   The Lost Paradise and Orson Welles’s Lost Magnum Opus

Pre-film lecture and screening:

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, 82 minutes).

Readings:          D. Cook: A History, pp. 391-420.

G. Deleuze: Cinema 2, pp. 98-155.

E. Roraback: “Cinema Against Cinema: The Orson Welles Hit Parade”.

                           F. Truffaut: “Foreword” to André Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical View, pp. 1-                         

                           27.

Clips:                Chimes at Midnight (1966, dir. Orson Welles).

8 December:   The Early Sound Soviet Cinema & the Later Quiet Eisenstein

Pre-film lecture and screening:              

Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (1946, Russian with English subtitles, 85                                                                      minutes, dir. Sergei Eisenstein).

Clips:                Battleship Potemkin (1925, Russian intertitles with English subtitles, dir. Sergei Eisenstein); Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944, Russian with English subtitles, 99 minutes, dir. Sergei Eisenstein).

15 December:  Post-film lecture/discussion on Ivan the Terrible, Part Two

Readings:          D. Cook: A History, pp. 361-62.

                          G. Lambert: “Cinema and the Outside” in The Brain is the Screen, pp. 253-92.

E. Roraback: “Cinematic Silence: Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I and Ivan

the Terrible, Part II (Ivan Groznyi)”.

Final essay due Thursday 22 December 2005.