This course fulfills the "Category II: Themes, Genres, and Theory" Film and Media Studies requirement and the "Historical Analysis" General Education requirement for the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
This class pursues three related lines of enquiry about cinema as a political practice:
1) Examining the ways cinema has been used by dominant groups – such as states, militaries, corporations – to advance both broad and specific goals for the political and economic management of populations. (E.g. the state development of propaganda; the corporate innovation of Public Relations; the development of a corporate financed and controlled mainstream industry producing film for commercial gain (sometimes in collaboration with the state).)
2) Examining the ways oppositional, radical, political groups from diverse perspectives have innovated and developed a political cinema to challenge power at either local, national, or global level. We will examine some aspects of the global history of these movements, from early oppositional cinematic practices to the flowering of a post-colonial cinema of resistance beginning in the 1950s, to the current proliferation of a digital activism like for example that seen recently in relation to the ongoing intifadas in the Arab world.
3) We will examine these practices, across history and geography, in dialogue with writing that sought and seeks to explore the politics of cinema and media, looking closely at manifestos written by cultural activists and traditions of political modernist scholarship on cinema. Likewise, our examination of the films will enable us to learn about the specific conjunctures of political and economic struggle. The films will help us learn about the past in ways often occluded in mainstream media, and in particular the enactment and struggle against forms of territorial and economic imperialism, and the more recent (post-1973) intensification of a globalizing capitalism enshrined in the neo-liberal agendas exported with devastating consequences from the industrialized West.
Our (expansive) goals are to understand the role film and media plays in the orchestration of power, and how this has been contested and transformed.
In the midst of our 3 broad agendas, the class pursues some pragmatic objectives:
- It will expand knowledge of cinema history, including different histories of production, distribution, and exhibition. (We understand “cinema” here broadly to refer to the production and dissemination of moving pictures.).
- It will explore different forms of this cinema (documentary, experimental, propagandistic, fictional) and lead us to explore the politics of form cross history.
- It will explore the writings of cultural activists and academics as they examine questions about media, power, and influence.
- It will produce knowledge about past political struggles as mediated through film (and push us to learn about the socio-political contexts in which the films were made and circulated).
- Plus it will necessarily prompt questions about how different state systems engage with media and how the production and regulation of media are political acts that shape the possible public sphere. In pursuing these lines of enquiry our work will necessarily be inter-disciplinary, and we will draw in particular (but not exclusively) from scholarship in political history and political science, public policy, film, media, and cultural studies, history, and broadly progressive traditions of historical, cultural, and media analysis.
