This seminar considers the critical terrain of the moving image for the period 1890 to 1950 as it informs the discipline of film and media studies today. While contemporary work on both the histories of international cinema and the elusive nature of film and screen practices remains deeply indebted to classical film theory, researchers have also sought to rethink the standard historical construction of the cinema through recontextualization, historiographical critique, and genealogical investigation. Part introduction to an established film theory canon (Hugo Münsterberg, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and André Bazin) and part survey of early film history, this seminar also aspires to demonstrate the continuing richness and relevance of a cinema of modernity for media studies by reading some of today’s most important voices on moving-image culture and history.
Number of Credits
3
Mark Lynn Anderson