• Group presentation 5%
• Annotated filmography 20%
• Annotated bibliography 20%
• Essay proposal 10%
• Essay 30%
• Attendance and participation 15%

NOTES:

Syllabus  

January 3              
Introduction  
Dudley Andrew, "The Core and Flow of Film Studies," Critical Inquiry (Summer 2009): 879-915.  

January 10           
Inspiration from classical cinema theory  
Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Kracauer: Film, Medium of a Disintegrating World" and "Benjamin: Mistaking the Moon for a Ball," Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 3-39, 132-162. Electronic book  

January 17           
Deleuzian innovations  
Nick Davis, “The desiring-image,” The desiring-image: Gilles Deleuze and contemporary queer cinema (New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 2013), 1-25. On Canvas   Ilona Hongisto, “Fabulation: documentary visions” (excerpt), Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 67-82.  

January 24           
Embodiment and affect  
Anand Pandian, “Love” and “Pleasure,” Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 85-98, 167-169, and notes. Steven Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,” Film-Philosophy 14:1 (2010): 1-11, 35-64. Electronic journal  Patricia Pisters, “Orchestration of the Senses in Yellow: Eisenstein’s Fourth Dimension, Memory, and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia,” in Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art, ed. Daria Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 71-90.  

January 31           
Moving images in the gallery   Catherine Elwes, “The Dialectics of Spectatorship,” Installation and the Moving Image (London: Wallflower Press, 2015), 142-163.   Isaac Julien, “Choreographing the Moving Image: Post-Cinematic Desire and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Technology and Desire: The Transgressive Art of Moving Images, ed. Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz (Bristol: Intellect, 2014), 269-282.   Erica Balsom, "Original Copies: How Film and Video Became Art Objects," Cinema Journal 53:1 (Fall 2013): 97-118.   

February 7            Archive   Wanda Strauven, “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet,” in Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta G. Sabra, Barbara Le Maître, and Vinsenz Hediger (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 59-80.   John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun, “An Absence of Ruins,” in The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 130-137.   Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tom Holert, “The Archival Multitude,” Journal of Visual Culture 12:3 (December 2013): 349.   Optional: Eyal Weizman, “What is forensic architecture?,” Forensic Architecture: Violence at the threshold of visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)  

No class February 14: Reading week Annotated filmography due February 21  

February 21        
Cosmologies
Sheila J. Petty, “African frameworks of analysis for African film studies,” in De- Westernizing Film Studies, ed. Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (London: Routledge, 2012), Laura U. Marks, “‘We will exchange your likeness and recreate you in what you will not know’: Cinema and process philosophy,” in Film Theory Handbook, ed. Hunter Vaughn and Tom Conley (forthcoming, Anthem Press)   February 28         Ecologies   Sean Cubitt, “Eco-mediation,” Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2016) Adrian Ivakhiv, “Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis,” Ecologies of the Moving Imagature (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). 34-67. Electronic book

No class March 7,

March 14: LM away   Annotated bibliography due March 21  

March 21               Compression and circulation   Jonathan Sterne, “Format Theory,” MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1-31. Electronic book   Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 31-45.   Tilman Baumgartel, Sarah Cook, Charlotte Frost, and Caitlin Jones, “Abstract Video: net.video.abstraction,” in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 129-144.  

March 28              
Distribution economies  
Jade Miller, “Labor in Lagos: Alternative Global Networks,” in Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor, ed. Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 146-158. Electronic book   Jacob King and Jason Simon, “Before and After UbuWeb: A conversation about artists' film and video distribution” Rhizome.org,

February 20, 2014 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/feb/20/and-after-ubuweb-distributing-artists-film-and-vid/   Ramon Lobato, “Six Faces of Piracy,” Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69-92. On Canvas   Dan Gao, “From Pirate to Kino-eye: A Genealogical Tale of Film Re-Distribution in China,” in China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu and Luke Vulpiani (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 125-146. Electronic book   Essay proposal due April 4  

April 4                    
The attention economy   Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (London: Allen Lane, 2013), xi-xiii, 32-47.   Jonathan Beller, “Pathologistics of Attention,” Discourse, 35.1, Winter 2013, pp. 46–71. Rob Gallagher, “Eliciting Euphoria Online: The Aesthetics of ‘ASMR’ Video Culture,” Film Criticism 40:2 (June 2016).  

April 11                 
Review   
Research essay due April 20

REQUIREMENTS:

Guidelines  

Group presentation Each week in class you will form groups to discuss a reading or moving-image work, and I will ask one group to take a few minutes to present their findings. The grade (same for each group member) reflects the richness of your discussion and clarity with which you communicate your findings.  

Annotated filmography, 1500 words.
From the list I provide, identify 3 to 5 films, media artworks, or other moving-image works. Write a detailed description of each work with close attention to aesthetic qualities. This will give you basic material for your research essay.   Annotated bibliography, 1500 words. Please choose 3 to 5 course readings that interest you; make sure to scan ahead in the syllabus. Identify the text's context: the discipline, the writer’s point of view, and the debate into which they are intervening. Summarize the aspects of the text that are most interesting to you, mention any points of divergence, and state how it may be useful for your research. This will give you basic material for your research essay.  

Essay proposal, about 300 words, due April 4
Outline your proposed research essay in one page. Identify the work or works that interest you and some of the issues and questions they raise. Identify the concepts that seem most likely to respond fruitfully to these questions, and explain why. Include a hypothesis and describe how you will go about testing it. Include a bibliography of at least 5 items (some of these can be from your annotated bibliography).  

Research essay,
4000 words, due April 20 Examine one or more moving-image works in light of one or more concepts from the class. Aspire to make the essay well grounded, original, and interesting. I like essays that pay close attention to both the artwork and the concepts, so please do that. This is a scholarly essay, appropriately structured and written, with complete references in MLA or Chicago style. Aspire to write creatively and beautifully, but first, aim to write clearly.  

Attendance and participation
Attendance is worth 10%. Given the size of our class, participation is worth just 5%: it constitutes informed (i.e. having done the reading) and thoughtful contributing to class discussion, with special attention to responding to your colleagues.  

Manners in class
Please turn off your mobile phone and put it away. If you use a computer or other device to take notes, please disable its internet access, and sit in the back row of the class so your screen does no distract others.  

Late penalty and grace period
You have a one-day grace period for each assignment; you can e-mail it to me by midnight the day after the deadline without penalty. After that, assignments lose 1/3 of a grade point for every 2 days late.  

E-mail
I do not check e-mail in evenings or on weekends, so please plan accordingly!