Studies in Cinema

A seminar based on a special topic in the study of cinema. The seminar may be repeated for credit with the permission of the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Studies in Cinema: The Couple Form (Spring 2024)
What does it mean to inhabit the world as two? The couple—as a form, aspiration, mandate, and obstacle—has occupied writers, artists, filmmakers, and social scientists for centuries. Shaping discursive and institutional frameworks at the level of the body, the household, and the state, the couple continues to be one of the most tenacious, if contested and ever-changing, forms of loving and living. In cinema, the couple has been a central figure for narrative experiments in companionship, complicity, and enmity: the forbidden love in Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955); the partners-in-crime in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967); the neighbor-lovers of a waterlogged Taiwan in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998); the paranoid, self-isolating lovers in William Friedkin’s Bug (2006) etc.
 
The course combines weekly film screenings with readings in literature, gender studies, film theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, we will, first, identify and analyze the potentialities and limits of the couple form, and, second, develop analytical tools needed to understand and elucidate film form. 
 
Students are expected to participate fully in class and keep a running journal. Class assignments will include 2 quizzes, a short response paper, and a final 8–10-page term paper.
 

3 credits

Course Code: HUM 358

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