Spring 2018 - CA 824 G200
New Approaches in Moving-Image Studies (4)
Class Number: 12988
Delivery Method: In Person
Overview
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Course Times + Location:
Jan 3 – Apr 10, 2018: Wed, 9:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m.
GOLDCORP
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Instructor:
Laura Marks
lmarks@sfu.ca
Description
CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:
This course is an elective in the MA program. In it we examine what are understood as the arts of the moving image: these include film, video, and other time based audiovisual media. We will begin by grounding our objects of study, i.e. specific works and practices, in cinema studies and survey emerging approaches in cinema studies, relating these developments to the longer history of the discipline. Investigating cinema intermedially, we will keep in mind the art forms that informed it historically, including theater, public spectacles, photography, painting, music, sound recording. Then the course will examine how the practice, aesthetics, and reception change when cinema moves to television, both move to digital formats, and all these platforms move to handheld and social media. We will investigate medium specificity in the moving-image arts in light of what is termed "media convergence." We will consider what new forms emerge when moving images shift from the institution of cinema to other contexts such as museums and online sites. The course includes two or three weeks topics of interest that arise in the field, such as new national cinemas, new approaches to documentary, cognitive theory and neuroscience, etc. Students with credit for FPA 824 may not take this course for further credit.
COURSE DETAILS:
A rarity just a hundred years ago, recorded moving images (usually audiovisual) now appear ubiquitous, decorating surfaces of all sorts, shooting around online, celebrated in theatrical screenings, looking up from handheld devices, lingering in archive vaults and YouTube channels. This course looks at some of the new ways scholars are understanding moving-image culture, with an emphasis on giving roots, substance, and histories to apparently rootless and immaterial images. This is a dense course, and I don’t expect you to fully absorb all the material during the semester. However, the assignments will allows you to engage deeply with a few texts, use them to develop your thinking about your object of study, and explore them further as you continue in your degree. This course is shared with FPA 436: grad students will meet for an additional hour. Texts are available electronically through the SFU Library web site or on Leganto.
Grading
- 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): 345-363. 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 Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (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.
Essay proposal due March 21
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. 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
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), 46–71. Rob Gallagher, “Eliciting Euphoria Online: The Aesthetics of ‘ASMR’ Video Culture,” Film Criticism 40:2 (June 2016).
Essay proposal due April 4
April 11
Review
Research essay due April 20
Materials
MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:
Guidelines Presentation on reading (in grad section) In 10 minutes, teach us just one or two of the most important points from the text. Give some context: with what disciplines and concepts is the author engaging, and what intervention is s/he making? Suggest how the ideas might be applied. Please supply me with a list of the sources you consulted.
Annotated filmography, 1500 words. Identify three films, media artworks, or other moving-image works related to your object of study, or from the list I provide. 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 three 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 500 words, due March 21
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.
Relate the essay to your ongoing work on your object of study. Include a bibliography of at least 5 items (these can be from your annotated bibliography). For each work you cite, explain in a couple of sentences how it will support your research in one or more of these ways.
Identify the readership(s) or audience(s) to whom your research will most likely be relevant. What disciplines are involved? Name a few journals or other sites that would make good venues for your essay.
Research essay, 5000 words, due April 20 Examine one or more moving-image works related to your object of study in light of one or more concepts from the course. Graduate-level research needs to be thorough enough to demonstrate that your inquiry is well grounded, original, and interesting to a given readership, so please do that. 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.
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, unless we agree in advance on an extension.
E-mail I do not check e-mail in evenings or on weekends, so please plan accordingly!
Graduate Studies Notes:
Important dates and deadlines for graduate students are found here: http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies/current/important_dates/guidelines.html. The deadline to drop a course with a 100% refund is the end of week 2. The deadline to drop with no notation on your transcript is the end of week 3.
Registrar Notes:
SFU’s Academic Integrity web site http://students.sfu.ca/academicintegrity.html is filled with information on what is meant by academic dishonesty, where you can find resources to help with your studies and the consequences of cheating. Check out the site for more information and videos that help explain the issues in plain English.
Each student is responsible for his or her conduct as it affects the University community. Academic dishonesty, in whatever form, is ultimately destructive of the values of the University. Furthermore, it is unfair and discouraging to the majority of students who pursue their studies honestly. Scholarly integrity is required of all members of the University. http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gazette/student/s10-01.html
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: YOUR WORK, YOUR SUCCESS