The course will examine a number of distinctively cinematic engagements with principal themes in the existentialist tradition, among them identity and responsibility, alienation and abandonment, perception and reality, communication and contact, finitude and mortality, madness and sanity. A central focus throughout will be on fundamental issues of ethical choice and commitment, in keeping with the key existentialist insistence on the
ineluctability of human moral situatedness, and thus on the permanent necessity of life-defining decision in the face of radical uncertainty.
Films to be considered will be drawn from the work of directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard, Fellini, Truffaut, Herzog, Wenders,Kubrick, Ford, and Huston, among others, and will reflect the range of
cinematic genres in which existentialist themes have figured prominently(including science fiction, film noir and detective films, road films, the Western, comedy, war, and others).
Existentialist cinema represents a convergence of one of the most significant
directions in philosophical thought over the last century-to-century-and-a-
half--existentialism--with one of the most important technological advances
to emerge during the same period--film. The study of existentialist cinema
is thus at once an encounter with a distinctive philosophical tradition and, at
the same time, an exploration of specifically filmic modes of capturing,
processing, and transmitting images of the human condition and the myriad
conflicts and dilemmas that inform it. In addition to the films themselves to
be discussed in the course, readings will therefore include as well both
seminal philosophical texts and important works of media theory dealing with
the production, dissemination, and societal reception of cinema. |
