Winter, 2007
PHIL 339A
Special Topics in Aesthetics:
PHILOSOPHY OF FILM
W 18:00-20:15, H 625
(plus viewing sessions immediately following the class)
Course Description:
This course will serve as a general introduction to the history and to the core questions of philosophical aesthetics, with especial attention to the way these questions come up in relation to one particular art form: film. We will also consider the problems of philosophical aesthetics that pertain uniquely to this art form. We will do this both by reading and discussing theoretical texts on film, as well as by watching lots of movies. We will be considering film both with respect to the ontology of the artwork as well as to the phenomenology of the viewing experience. What we will not be doing in this course is philosophy through film. That is, we will not be using films to inspire us to ask philosophical questions not related to film, such as, ‘How do I know I don’t, like, live in the Matrix?’ or ‘Did Sophie make the right choice?’ Such questions might come up in passing, but it will be our foremost purpose to approach aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical domain.
Means of Evaluation:
∑ One final paper (10-12 pages) on a topic chosen in consultation with instructor (50%)
∑ 12 short response papers on weekly movies (topics to be assigned in class) (40%)
∑ Participation and attendance (10%)
Required Texts (available at the Concordia University Bookstore):
∑ André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (University of California Press, 2004).
∑ Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, 1979).
∑ Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, and Other Writings (Routledge, 2001).
In addition, there will be a course pack consisting in readings from the following texts (available at Copies Concordia, on Maisonneuve between Mackay and Guy):
∑ Aristotle, Poetics
∑ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement
∑ Richard Wagner, “The Artwork of the Future”
∑ Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”
∑ L’ev Tolstoï, What is Art?
∑ Sergeï Eisenstein, “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form”; “Statement on Sound” (with Aleksandrov and Pudovkin)
∑ Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
∑ Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art
∑ Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures”
∑ Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film
∑ Noël Caroll, Theorizing the Moving Image
∑ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Movement Image, and Cinema: The Time Image
We will be watching and discussing all or most of the following films:
∑ 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (U. S., 1968)
∑ Andreï Rublëv, Andreï Tarkovskiï (USSR, 1969)
∑ L’année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais (France, 1961)
∑ Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson (France, 1966)
∑ The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith (U. S., 1915)
∑ Blue Velvet, David Lynch (U. S., 1986)
∑ Chelovek s kinoapparatom [Man with a Movie Camera], Dziga Vertov (USSR, 1929)
∑ Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel (France/Spain, 1929)
∑ Roma, Città apperta [Rome, Open City], Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1946)
∑ Ladri di biciclette [The Bicycle Thief], Vittorio de Sica (Italy, 1948)
∑ Potemkin [The Battleship Potemkin], Sergei Eisenstein (USSR, 1927)
∑ La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark, 1928)
∑ Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock (U. S., 1960)
∑ La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir (France, 1939)
∑ Top Hat, Mark Sandrich (U. S., 1936)
∑ Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel according to Saint Matthew], Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy, 1964)
∑ Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1968)
Questions to be discussed:
∑ What is ‘realistic’ about cinematic realism? What, for that matter, could ‘neo-realism’ possibly mean?
∑ How could it have happened that for several decades (from The Wizard of Oz in 1939 to some time in the mid-1960s) black-and-white film was perceived by viewers as depicting ‘reality’ (e.g., Kansas), while color was used to indicate the fantastic or the hyper-real (e.g., Oz)? Our non-cinematic world, after all, is in color.
∑ Is the world the raw material of cinema in the same way that, e.g., stone is of sculpture?
∑ Is cinema an autonomous aesthetic domain? In what ways does it overlap with other art forms?
∑ What is pornography? Is it bad by definition? Some have called slasher films ‘violence porn’. To what extent is this extension of the concept valid?
∑ What is television? Is it bad by definition? Why does it make sense to teach a class on the philosophy of film, while TV is surely something far too… what?… undignified, thoughtless, etc., to warrant philosophical investigation?
∑ Why can’t actors in legitimate, non-pornographic films have real sex? They’re acting, after all. (Even if it is happening more and more, as in the New French Extremism, it is always received with at least feigned shock.) Does this general prohibition show that there are some actions that are so potent or charged that they cannot possibly be contained within a dramatic role, that they, as it were, bleed out into reality even if they are meant to be performed in character?
∑ Is cinema fundamentally narrative (like theatre and literature) or is the relative rarity of non-narrative film, having more in common with painting or montage, a contingent and historical fact about the art form?
∑ How does editing produce meaning? Are meaning-producing editing techniques natural or conventional?
∑ What were the aesthetic and theoretical reasons for the widespread opposition to the incorporation of sound into cinema at the end of the 1920s? Was this mere conservatism, or was it motivated by a conception of the integrity of the art form that has since been forgotten?
∑ Do film images produce or represent reality? Are they more like photographs or paintings in this regard?
∑ In phenomenological and experiential terms, how accurate is the movie/dream comparison?
∑ Are directors the ‘authors’ of films?
∑ What did people do before movies? That is, what is the nature of the aesthetic, cognitive, emotional experiences now facilitated by movies but nonetheless shared with human cultures that existed before the technology that makes movies possible?
∑ What is it about movies that justifies identifying a still of an actor in a movie by reference to the actor and not the character, even if, in watching the movie, it is the character and not the actor on whom the viewer, ideally, is meant to focus?
∑ Why is it that, since the very beginning, special pleading has had to be made for the status of cinema as an art? Are the questions at issue here the same as those involved in the contested status of photography as art?
∑ What is the difference between avant-garde and mass cinema, i.e., between ‘film’ and ‘movies’? How does this distinction relate to the high-art, low-art distinction that precedes the appearance of cinematic technology?
Schedule of Readings (subject to change):
Week 1— 3 January
Introduction. What is aesthetics?
Week 2—10 January
What is aesthetics? continued.
Readings : Aristotle, Poetics; Kant, Critique of Judgment; Tolstoï, What is Art?
Film : Psycho
Week 3—17 January
Where did movies come from? What is unique about them?
Readings : Charles Baudelaire, « The Painter of Modern Life, » Richard Wagner, « The Artwork of the Future, » Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (excerpt, to be distributed)
Film : The Birth of a Nation
Week 4—24 January
What is ‘realism’?
Readings : André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1.
Film : Open City
Week 5— 31 January
What is ‘realism’ (continued)?
Readings : André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1.
Film: Ladri di biciclette
Week 6— 7 February
Montage and the ‘Language’ of Editing
Readings : Eisenstein (various); Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art.
Films : Potemkin; Man with a Movie Camera (excerpts).
Week 7— 7 February
What is avant-garde cinema?
Readings : Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image.
Films: Weekend; Dog Star Man (excerpts)
Week 8—14 February
What is pornography? What do the ‘ratings’ rate? (And again, relatedly, what is art?)
Readings: TBA
Film: Blue Velvet
Week 9— 21 February—Winter Break, No Class!
Week 10—28 February
More on film, language, and the language of film
Readings : Eisenstein, « Statement on Sound, » Panofsky, « Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures. »
Film : La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Week 11— 7 March
Movies, Dreams, and Consciousness.
Readings : Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Mind and Screen Interact (excerpts, to be distributed)
Films : Un chien andalou; L’année dernière à Marienbad
Week 12— 14 March
Movies and Society
Readings : Walter Benjamin, « Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, » Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (selections, to be distributed).
Film: Top Hat
Week 13— 21 March
Movies as Social Critique
Readings: TBA.
Film: La règle du jeu
Week 14— 28 March
Showing as opposed to Saying: Film and Transcendence
Readings: Noël Carroll (various); Gilles Deleuze (various); Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay.
Film: Au hasard Balthazar
Week 15— 4 April
Film and Ontology
Readings: Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay
Film: 2001, A Space Odyssey
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