PMA 3415 - Weimar Cinema

(crosslisted)
(also GERST 3621) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

B. Hanrahan.

This seminar offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse film culture of the Weimar epoch, focusing on the close analysis and careful contextualization of a wide range of key films. Canonical works by directors such as Wiene, Lang, Murnau, Ruttmann, Papst and others will be supplemented by lesser-known films, as well as by contemporary writings on aesthetics, spectatorship and media, and readings in the contested historiography of the epoch’s cinema. Topics will include questions of form, genre and style, as well as issues - as pressing then as now - of technology and modernity, politics and gender, war and trauma, display, distraction and desire. (HTC)