Anthropology and Film
This course looks at a variety of representational practices - like
ethnographic film, Hollywood blockbusters, indie movies, film criticism,
psychoanalytic theory, dialectical montage and horror film - as cultural
products and as productive of culture. This means we will seek to unravel the
form and content of these forms of expression to see how they are made and
how they are symptoms of specific historical moments and specific political
struggles. What stories about race, sexuality, power, and gender are encoded
there? We will also examine how they make us - how we get positioned to
make meaning from 24-frames-a-second, how images "suture" us into
raced, nationed, classed, and gendered subjects. How does flickering light
have such material effects?
This will call for constructing a tool kit of theories drawn from feminism,
post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis, and critical ethnography. A central
question that organizes the course is: how have, how can, and how should
the experiences of hard times be represented. Does
documentary/ethnography adequately capture these lived experiences? Do
high-production value Hollywood films? What about slasher/slice and dice B-
grade and below horror films? Why are the latter far more "popular" than the
former - even (especially) in countries where colonialism, genocide, and
ethnocide are still part of daily life and memory? In turn, as Blade Runner so
poignantly asks, what IS memory without "souvenirs" without re-minders,
without photographic evidence? And what are WE without memory?
The course will be very interested in the pleasures of the text (what is so
damn fun about movies?!) as well as the pleasures of hard thinking and
analysis.
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