PMA 4370 - [50’s Movie Musicals and Modernism]

(LA-AS)

4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

B. Suber.

Utilizing, as a point of departure, films such as A Star is Born and White Christmas, this seminar will explore modernist spatialities, as defined through body movement and architecture. Rising tensions between popular entertainment and modernist impulses, and between stage, screen and television, will be examined. Camp as queer sensibility in non-musical films such as All About Eve, and semi-musicals such as, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, will be related to the movie musical, modern dance, modern architecture and modern art practices. Also, the class will look to the Hayes Code as arbiter of a surrealist aesthetic from films such as An American in Paris to television specials such as Raquel, featuring a futuristic, Barbarella-esque, Raquel Welch. (HTC)