PHIL281 Special Topics: Film and Philosophy
Course Description
This course will investigate the dominant art form of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries - namely the motion picture - from several philosophical perspectives. We will begin by exploring, with the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, the underlying symbolic structure of film as an imagistic language of motion and time, a language that enables the filmmaker to think about central questions of human experience in a sophisticated, though non-conceptual, fashion. We will then proceed to examine, in the work of the film theorist Andre Bazin and the filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Cocteau, the three fundamental relations that the film as an aesthetic object can entertain with reality, those of reflection, construction, and dream-like confabulation. Once we have examined film in its symbolic structure as well as its alternative strategies for referring to reality, we will go on to investigate, with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the film theorist Laura Mulvey, and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, one of its most persistent and ubiquitous themes, that of desire, amorous experience, and the emergence of multiple forms of sexuality. Finally, in the work of the literary critic Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Theodore Adorno, and the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, we will consider a controversy that has marked film from its historical beginning: is the cinema capable of affecting the world in a thoughtful and transformative way, or is it instead overwhelmingly, or even exclusively, an instrument of cultural manipulation? In each of the four sections of the course, we will rely on discussions of scenes and sequences excerpted from important films, as well as relevant textual material.
Course Video
Video IntroductionClosed Captioned
Academic Information
Credits: 3
Schedule & Fee
Dates: Sep 13 - Dec 10
Class #: 15262
Course Fee: $960
Lab Fee: $0
Total Course Fee: $960
Instructor
Gary Zabel
Wimba Requirement
UMB online courses use Wimba classroom (a live discussion tool) at least twice during the semester. Information about Horizon Wimba can be found at www.dlvpc.umb.edu/wimbasupport.htm. Your course instructor will inform you about dates and times of course meetings in Wimba Classroom.