21L.706 Studies in Film

Same Subject As: CMS.830
Prereq: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit

This seminar explores the topic of love through the encounter of cinema and philosophical and film-theoretical accounts of care, desire, friendship, passion, intimacy, and both sanctioned and risky forms of entwinement. Films include His Girl Friday, The Graduate, Casablanca, Before Sunrise, All that Heaven Allows, Brokeback Mountain, In the Mood for Love, Blue is the Warmest Color, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Audition, Amour Fou, The Worst Person in the World, Stranger by the Lake, Moonlight, Anora, and Her. Readings from Aristophanes, Barthes, Berlant, Bersani, Derrida, Freud, Hegel, Stendhal, The Dictionary of Untranslatables, and film theorists. Each week, we will closely analyze the aesthetic features of a range of films in order to ask how cinema explores conceptual problems related to love, including whether eros is a matter of closure/resolution or aperture/rupture; whether it involves a search for similitude or an encounter with difference; whether love is a form of knowledge or an intimacy based on strangeness; and love’s relation to sincerity versus cynicism, physical desire versus spiritual purity, and the eternal versus the ephemeral or provisional. We’ll explore love of the friend, self, stranger, and love’s relationship to its opposites: hatred, the death of love, the memory of love. We’ll ask of our films whether their account of love is marked by affects of joy, ecstasy, satisfaction, happiness, or whether their theory of love is marked by pathos, melancholy, anxiety, disgust, resentment, loneliness? We’ll wonder whether love itself (or a certain myth of love) requires reinvention, and how might cinema imagine or propose that reinvention? Pre-requisite: One prior course in film or permission of instructor.