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Strand 1: Theorising Moving Images

Michaelmas term, Thursdays, 1-3pm, weeks 1-8 (unless otherwise stated)

1.   Ontology

John David Rhodes (jdr42@cam.ac.uk)

Reading

• Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (London: Vintage, 2000 [1980]). (If possible, students should acquire their own copies of Camera Obscura).
• André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema?. Volume I. Hugh Gray, ed. and trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9-16.
• Jonathan Beller, ‘Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light’, The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 99-114.

Further Reading

• Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3-35. 
• Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 10-25; 118-133.
• Laura Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny: Life and Death in the Photograph’, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion: London, 2006), 54-66.

• Jean-Luc Nancy, "The image--the Distinct.” In Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. Jeff Fort, trans. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 1-14.
• Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth, NH: University Press of New England, 2013), pp. 21-51.

• Phil Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Screening

• Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison, 1903)
• How It Feels to Be Run Over (Hepworth, 1900)
• Mothlight (Stan Brakhage,1963)
• Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1963)
• Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)
• The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith, 1976)

2. The Aesthetic

John David Rhodes

Reading  

• Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the power of judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000 [1790]), pp. 89-127; 182-187.
• Gilles Deleuze, 'Having an Idea in Cinema', G. Deleuze & F. Guattari,  New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 14-19.
• Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’”, in Heretical Empiricism, Louise K. Barnett, ed., Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, trans. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.

 Further Reading

• Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 12-34 and 42-45.

• Jacques Rancière, 'What Aesthetics Can Mean', From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Sciences, Peter Osborne, ed. (London: Serpent's Tail, 2000), 13-33.
• Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant's Critique of Judgement (Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
• Fiona Hughes, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: A Reader's Guide (London: Continuum, 2010).
• Scott Durham, ‘“The Center of the World is Everywhere": Bamako and the Scene of the Political’ World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008). http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_2/Durham.html

Screening  

• Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)

3. Form and Medium

John David Rhodes

Reading

• G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I T.M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1835]), pp. 1-55.
• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London: Penguin 1990), Chapter 7, Part 1 'The Labour Process', pp. 283-292.
• Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film, in Essential Deren, Bruce R. McPherson, ed. (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2005), pp. 35-109.

Further Reading

• Erwin Panofksy, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Christopher S. Wood, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
• Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Michael Shaw, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 55-82.
• David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 3-47; 48-62.
• Bernard Siegert, ‘Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic’, John Durhan Peters, trans. Grey Room 47 (Spring 2012), pp. 6-23.
• Lorenz Engell, ‘Ontogenetic machinery’, Radical Philosophy 169 (September-October 2011), pp. 10-12.

Screening

• Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946)
• Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

4. Watching

John David Rhodes

Reading

• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London: Penguin 1990); Chapter 1, Section 4, 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret', pp. 163-177.
• Sigmund Freud, 'Fetishism' (1927), The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI, James Strachey, trans. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1950), pp. 147-157.
• Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6-18.
• bell hooks, 'The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators'. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 115-152.
• Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1-34.

Further Reading

•  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception', in Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (London: Verso, 1997 [1944]), pp. 120-167.
• Jean-Louis Baudry, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus', trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly, 28.2 (Winter 1974-5), pp. 39-47.
• Jean-Louis Baudry, 'The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema', Camera Obscura 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 104-128.
• Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth College Press, 2006), pp. 1-33.
• Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Celia Britton, trans. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982).
• Fred Camper, ‘The Films of Douglas Sirk’, Screen (Summer 1971), pp. 44-62.
• Paul Willemen, ‘Distanciation and Douglas Sirk’, Screen 12 (Summer 1971), pp. 63-67.
• Paul Willemen, ‘Towards and an Analysis of the Sirkian System’ Screen 13 (Winter 1972), pp. 128-134.

Screening

• Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
• Quality Control (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2011)

5. Time

Laura McMahon (lcm31@cam.ac.uk)

Reading

• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) - Preface, Translators’ Introduction and Chapter 1.
• Elena del Río, ‘Performing the narrative of seduction: Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (Good Work, 1999)’, Kinoeye, 3:7 (2003), https://www.kinoeye.org/03/07/delrio07.php

Further reading

• Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
• Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002).
• Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 1-32.
• Douglas Morrey, ed., ‘Special Issue: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy’, Film-Philosophy, 12.1 (2008) <http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/issue/view/11>
• Laura Mulvey, 'Passing Time', in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 17-32.
• Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘A-religion’, Journal of European Studies, 34:1/2 (2004), 14-18.
• Elena del Río, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
• David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

Screening 

• Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

6. Sensation

Emma Widdis (ekw1000@cam.ac.uk)

Reading

• Viktor Shklovskii, 'Art as Device', (1919), in Theory of Prose, trans. and ed. Benjamin Sher (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), pp. 1-15.
• Dziga Vertov, 'The Cine-Eyes. A Revolution', (1923), in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 89-94.
• Sergei Eisenstein, 'The Problem of a Materialist Approach to Form' (1925), in Richard Taylor, ed., S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Writings 1922-34, Selected Works, Vol.1 (London: BFI, 1998), pp. 59-64.
• Béla Bálazs, Béla Bálazs: Early Film Theory, Erica Carter, ed.; Rodney Livingstone, trans. (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 1-15; 40-45. See also Erica Carter, 'Introduction,' pp. xxiv-xxv.
• Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217-251.
• Miriam Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism/Modernity 6:2 (April 1999), pp. 59-77.
• Malcolm Turvey, 'Balázs: Realist or Modernist?', October 115 (2006), pp. 77-87.

Screening

• Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov,1929)

Further screening

• Film Eye (Dziga Vertov, 1924)
• Three Songs of Lenin (Dziga Vertov, 1934)
• The New World (Terence Malick, 2005)

7. Exclusions

John David Rhodes

Reading

• Frank Wilderson, Red, White, Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 1-32.
• Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1-31.
• Hito Steyerl, 'In Defense of the Poor Image', in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 31-45.

Further reading

• Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: how legal rituals make and unmake persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)
• Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge: 1993), pp. 121-140.
• bell hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning?’. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press, 1992) , pp. 145-156.
• Eva Cherniavsky, Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 71-99.
• Meg Wesling, ‘Queer Value’, glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 18:1 (2012), pp. 107-125.
• Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’. In Against Interpretation (New York: Dell Publishing, 1966), pp. 275-292.
• Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA; Brooklyn, NY: PM Press; Autonomedia, 2012).
• Alyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
• Cheryl Harris, 'Whiteness as Property', Harvard Law Review 106:8 (June 1993), pp. 1707-91.

Screening

• Several Friends (Charles Burnett, 1969)
• Sodom (Luther Price, 1989)
• Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2009)
• Formation (Beyoncé Knowles, Melina Matsoukas, 2016)

Further Screening

• Paris is Burning (Jenny Livingston, 1990)
• Mariposas en el Andamio (Butterflies on the Scaffold,  Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza; 1996)
• Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)

8.  Post-

John David Rhodes

Reading

• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1-54.
• Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (London: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 11-34.
• Rosi Braidotti, ‘Introduction’, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 1-12

Screening

• Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
• Corporate Cannibal (Grace Jones [performer] and Nick Hooker [director], 2008)

Further reading

• Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
• Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. xi-xxxiv.