Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

In 1987, shortly after the death of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), Akira Kurosawa said: “His unusual sensitivity is both overwhelming and astounding. It almost reaches a pathological intensity. Probably there is no equal among film directors alive now.” That same year, Ingmar Bergman wrote in his book
The Magic Lantern
: "Tarkovsky for me is the greatest of all directors. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally.” But… who was Andrei Tarkovsky? Why was he considered such a master filmmaker by his peers? And how might we approach his enigmatic cinema today? Following Gilles Deleuze’s idea that film directors may be compared with philosophers, this course examines the complete filmography of Tarkovsky through an analysis of his main “philosophical motifs” – loss of childhood, failure of familial bonds, aesthetic ecstasy, madness, physical redemption, apocalypse, etc. To understand how Tarkovsky visualized in film his “own patterns of thought about the external world” (his own words), we start by studying his student films at VGIK –
The Killers
(1958) and
The Steamroller and the Violin
(1960)– and his first feature,
Ivan’s Childhood
(1962), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. We then focus on Tarkovsky’s works made within the Soviet film system:
Andrei Rublev
(1966),
Solaris
(1972),
The Mirror
(1974), and
Stalker
(1979). Special attention is paid to the director’s troubled relationship with authorities at Mosfilm studios. The last part of the semester we follow the filmmaker in exile, first to Italy –
Voyage in Time
(1983) and
Nostalgia
(1983)– and then to Sweden, where he directed his last film,
The Sacrifice
(1986). Throughout the semester we study in depth Tarkovsky’s own aesthetic treatise
Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
, originally published in Berlin in 1986. Excerpts from his diaries between 1970 and 1986, posthumously published as
Martyrology
(1989), as well as several interviews with the director, are also available to the students as primary sources for this course.

Department: Film @Barnard
W 9:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Instructor: Breixo Viejo Vinas
CULPA: 5 Info
3 points

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FILM BC3650

PROBABILITY FOR ENGINEERS

Department: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
Instructor: Daniel Lacker
CULPA: 4 h-index: 13 Info
3 points

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IEOR E3658

The Ancient Table: Archaeology of Cookin

ANCT TBL: ARCH COOKING &

Department: Anthropology @Barnard
W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
Instructor: Camilla Sturm
CULPA: 2 Info
4 points

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ANTH UN3663

CLOTHING

Department: Art History @Barnard
TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
Instructor: Anne Higonnet
CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
4 points

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AHIS BC3667

SEEKING ASYLUM

Department: History @Barnard
W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
Instructor: Nara Milanich
CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
4 points

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HIST BC3670

MAD LOVE

Department: Comparative Literature and Society @Barnard
MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
Instructor: Alfred Mac Adam
CULPA: 40 Info
3 points

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CPLT BC3675

ORGANIZING INNOVATION

Department: Sociology
TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
Instructor: David Stark
CULPA: 15 Wikipedia h-index: 48 Info
4 points

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SOCI UN3675

ORGANIZING INNOVATION-DISC

Department: Sociology
R 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
Instructor: Ari B Galper
Info
0 points

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SOCI UN3676

ORGANIZING INNOVATION-DISC

ORGANIZING INNOVATION-DISCUSSI

Department: Sociology
M 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
Instructor: Anna K Thieser
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0 points

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SOCI UN3676

ORGANIZING INNOVATION-DISC

Department: Sociology
R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
M 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
Instructor: Ari B Galper
Info
Instructor: Anna K Thieser
Info
0 points

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SOCI UN3676

EARLY MODERNISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRES

EARLY MDRNISM& CRISIS REPRSNT

Prerequisites: 20th Century Art recommended. The artistic phenomenon that came to be called Modernism is generally considered one of the most pivotal in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth century art. This course studies the emergence and development of Modernism in all of its complexity. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Modern artists responded to the dramatically changing notions of space, time and dimension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What impact did these dramatic changes have on existing concepts of representation? What challenges did they pose for artists? To what extent did Modernism contribute to an understanding of the full consequences of these new ideas of time and space? These concerns will lead us to examine some of the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts as they were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The course will focus specifically on the interrelationships between modernism and the expanding mass cultural formations of the industrial societies in Europe to address a wide range of historical and methodological questions. These include the emergence of modernism in the arts, the collapse of previous modes of representation, the development of new technologies of cultural production, the elaboration of the utopian projects of the avant-gardes, the unfolding of abstract art, the materialization of the readymade, as well as the transformation of concepts of artistic autonomy and cultural institutions. We will first investigate key modernist concepts developed in the late nineteenth century, as well as the crucial work of some of the artists of that moment. This will lead to an examination of the unfolding and consolidation of Cubism in the first decade of the twentieth century, followed by the development of Synthetic Cubism early in the 1910s. The third part of the course will study the impact of Cubism on artistic production in the following decade, focusing primarily on the Italian artists of Futurism, the German avant-garde in the context of Weimar culture, Dadaism, and the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes in the 1910s and 1920’s