SPAN 6750

Cinema, History, Violence

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

The advent of cinema brought with it the contradictory forces of assemblage and severance, and by extension the language of accumulation-gathering, collecting, archiving-with the action of the cut-editing, correcting, censoring.  For as much as cinema is rooted in a poetics of bringing disparate parts together into a whole, it also originates from a logic of disjuncture and exclusion.  How might cinema, understand as both synthesis and division, illuminate how we approach history?  Could we think of history in cinematic terms, as the assemblage of accumulated events, narratives, or images, the totality of which necessitates omission, erasure and destruction?  What does it mean for such an assemblage to be rooted in violence?  How does the ideological space of the screen aestheticize and frame representations of violence (wounded bodies, alienated subjectivities, post-colonial sites of struggle, gender divisions and racial inequality); how might the screen reproduce violence (distanciation, defamiliarization, spectatorial alienation)?

When Offered Spring.

Comments This is the mandatory course for 1st year Spanish graduate students.

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