AMST 4301 - The Rabinor Seminar

(crosslisted)
(also FILM 4301 )

Fall. 4 credits.

Permission of instructor is required.

S. Haenni.

The Rabinor Seminar explores the role of diversity in the formation of a distinct American tapestry. The specific topic varies each year, but the general subject is the promise and experience of pluralism.

Topic: Exporting the Gangster

This semester, we will focus on the social and cultural contexts of the gangster film. Usually emerging out of marginalized environments, the American gangster represents the flip side of the American capitalism. Unable to participate in the dream of social mobility, he rises in his own way, producing an alternative empire illegitimately. This filmic formula has been remarkably successful around the world, with foreign adaptations—and transformations—of American gangster films in places such as Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, and Marseilles, France. In this seminar, we watch and analyze American gangster films from the classic The Public Enemy (1931) to The Godfather (1972) and American Gangster (2007), and we will look at some of the related Hong Kong, Brazilian and French films. How does the gangster film represent, displace and transform issues of marginality and success? How does the relocation of the gangster film from the U.S. to a foreign city allow for new ways of addressing these issues? Does the global success of the gangster formula suggest a different way of understanding the “Americanization” of the world? (MV)