Courses of Study 2013-2014 
    
    Mar 29, 2024  
Courses of Study 2013-2014 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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SHUM 4988 - Cinema and the Time of Occupation: The Situationists and the Films of Guy Debord

(crosslisted)
(also VISST 4988 )
Spring. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

J. Smith.

This course will be devoted to a study of the political thought and artistic practices of the Situationist International (1957-1972), with a particular emphasis on the question of the cinema. Recent scholarship on the S.I. has paid particular attention to the organization’s early emphasis on the contemporary spectacular city and the types of spatial practices that might disrupt its logic of “occupation.” This course will instead emphasize the way film and the cinema form a central, if often neglected, concern of the S.I. from the very first issue of their journal; this emphasis on the cinema will in turn allow us to highlight the way in which the focus on spatial practices emphasized by recent scholarship can be supplemented or challenged by paying underlining not only to the role the S.I. accords the cinema in its conception of artistic practice, but to the films of Guy Debord as well. Taking as their central theme the spectacular city - exemplarily, Paris - these films, rarely seen and the subject of little critical commentary, present the city in thoroughly temporal terms, namely as an articulation of the linear time of production and “pseudo-cyclical” time of consumption and the reproduction of class power. In doing so, I argue, these films present themselves not simply as an analysis or diagramming of the temporal logic of the city, but as one way to disrupt this time as well, in view of the construction of a temporal “situation” or a properly revolutionary time.



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