GERST 4312 - [What was Film?]

(crosslisted) COML 4312, PMA 4512, STS 4821
(CA-AS)

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Taught in English. Film screening one evening per week TBA.

E. Born.

In retrospect, was film anything more than some highly flammable strips of celluloid? Taking its cue from the “digital turn,” this course rephrases a traditional question asked in film theory about the nature of the medium (What is film?) in terms of a historical question: What was film when it was still something to be cut, wound up, and carried around, a thing with a literally explosive potential? Reframing the object of study in this manner will help situate familiar narrative cinema within more unfamiliar scientific, aesthetic, and experimental contexts. Early film theorists saw great potential in the new medium, thought to be capable of conveying a new experience of movement and time, creating a new art of light and shadow, or functioning as a new kind of scientific instrument. Screenings will put readings of early film theory in dialogue with early European silent films that address similar concerns about the nature of cinema, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), and Man with a Movie Camera (1929).