Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of
The Wire
) President Barak Obama offered that
The Wire
is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of American art in the last couple of decades."
The Wire
combines hyperrealism with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city. On a more macro level
The Wire
humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.
The Wire
, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end. That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos. Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order):
The Sopranos
;
The Wire
;
Deadwood
;
Madmen
; and
Breaking Bad.

We need to consider carefully that these shows emerged during a particular moment on American history. This was a period shaped by an increasingly relativist conceptualizations of truth (and, at times, outright fraud) and a resultant loss of faith in American institutions. Resistance movements (MeeToo, and Black Lives Mater) began to shape. No wonder that so many of the series under discussion take place amid American cultures defined by a liminal faith in law and order, within the contexts of vague moral authorities and hold American institutions with a shared, deep, suspicion.

These show

M 2 p.m.-5 p.m.
Instructor: Ben Alexander
Info
3 points

Details

FILM GU4954

CINEMA HIST II: 1930-1960

T 2:10 p.m.-4:55 p.m.
Instructor: Ronald Gregg
CULPA: 2 Info
3 points

Details

FILM GR5015

CINEMA HIST III:1960-1990

W 2:10 p.m.-5:55 p.m.
Instructor: Annette Insdorf
CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
3 points

Details

FILM GR5020

World Cinema: Latin America- Women Filmm

Wld Cine: Lat Amer-Women

T 2:10 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
Instructor: Elizabeth Ramirez Soto
Info
3 points

Details

FILM AF5031

American Film: Comedy

TPCS IN AMER CINEMA

Grad section for FILM UN 2190 Topics in American Cinema. Comedy or Film Noir

Comedy:

This course will explore the history of American film comedy from the origins of cinema to the present. In its various forms, comedy has always been a staple of American film production; but it has also always been a site of heterogeneity and nonconformity in the development of American cinema, with neither its form nor its content fitting normative models of film practice. This course accounts for that nonconformity by exploring comedy’s close and essential links to “popular” cultural sources (in particular, vaudeville, variety, stand-up); it looks at how different comic filmmakers have responded to and reshaped those sources; and it examines the relation between comedy and social change. Rather than engage the entire spectrum of comic styles (animation, mockumentary, etc.), this course is primarily focused on a single tradition bridging the silent and sound eras: the performance-centered, “comedian comedy” format associated with performers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and, into the present Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell, and others. “Laughter and its forms,” writes theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, “represent the least scrutinized sphere of the people's creation.” This course will restore film comedy to the scrutiny it deserves, examining both its inward formal development and its external relation to other modes of cultural expression.

Film Noir:

This course surveys the American film genre known as film noir, focusing primarily on the genre’s heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s, taking into account some of its antecedents in the hard-boiled detective novel, German Expressionism, and the gangster film, among other sources. We will consider a number of critical and theoretical approaches to the genre, and will also study a number of film noir adaptations and their literary sources.