Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

This course will chart a history of French cinema through exemplary films of
mauvais goût
or bad taste
.
Whether they were explicitly banned or censured, deemed too grotesque, pornographic, or violent, cult classics or quite simply panned or labeled unwatchable, these films challenge received expectations of what a film should be. Beginning in the 1920s and ending in the present, this course will track major movements of French and Francophone cinema (surrealism, impressionism, realism, New Wave, Situationism,
cinéma-vérité, cinéma du look
, the New French Extreme, etc.) and seminal directors (Painlevé, Dulac, Vigo, Carné, Malle, Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Ozon, Kechiche, etc.) along multiple axes of “bad taste.” Since its inception in the 1890s, viewers have continuously questioned cinema’s relationship to morality, sexuality, and youth audiences, as well as its political dimensions. What qualifies as “bad cinema” is dictated as much by the technical evolution of the new medium, as it is by larger historical contexts: the First and Second World Wars, the decolonialization of the French empire, French Maoism, feminism, the AIDS crisis, the globalization of media, and so on. On the one hand, this course explores cinematic form and viewers’ reception, in both Europe and abroad, as the global industry itself changes. On the other hand, it addresses unique aspects of the French cinema industry, notably the French State’s outsized role in financing and promoting cinema. We will necessarily consider the history of film censorship, as various political, anti-Vichy, or anti-colonial films are routinely banned, and sometimes screened decades later. We will also investigate, however, more subtle questions of uncomfortable form and subject matter, especially in the unwatchable avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s and the grotesque, genre- and gender-bending works of the 1980s to 2020s. While this class leans heavily on cultural studies, it does not adhere to a strict interpretive framework and secondary readings engage with psychoanalysis, sociology, Marxism, material culture, feminist theory, and so on. Class taught in English with films in French with English Subtitles. Secondary materials in English.
French majors and minors must submit papers in French.
This class will also involve a few class field trips (TBD), likely to the Museum of the Moving Image and the Lincoln Film Center, as well as in-pe

Department: French
MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
Instructor: Aubrey A Gabel
CULPA: 2 Info
3 points

Details

FREN UN3945

Movement and Feeling

This seminar explores a deep imaginative connection between motion and emotion. The reading list places autobiographical, fictional, and poetic accounts of physical movement through the world alongside literary and philosophical treatments of sympathetic feeling for other people in that world. The course starts with a hypothesis. It proposes that travel and sympathy are structurally interrelated, each producing the other. The literary scripts for journeying to new places are also guides for developing an expanded repertoire of emotion, and the literary scripts for becoming a deeply feeling person double as travelogues or quest narratives.

To test this hypothesis, we’ll focus on writings from the eighteenth century, a period when sympathy took shape as a serious philosophical subject and when, as the British Empire expanded, Britons and people in contact with them encountered new forms of mobility. Sometimes movement was freely chosen, as in travel undertaken for leisure or self-discovery, but much of the time it was mandated by hardship or violence. The laboring classes at home found themselves increasingly displaced and itinerant while millions of African people abroad were enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean. It was in the eighteenth century, in fact, that Britain became the biggest slaving nation in the world, even as its thinkers were preoccupied with a new vocabulary of sentiment and the social virtue of politeness.

Racialization, the complex process in which categories of racial difference emerge and are activated, will be a recurring theme in our seminar. In several of our texts, to be a racialized body is to be a body on the move, but it’s also to be a faraway body, in transit from one distant place to another. For British writers, racialized bodies could either invite imaginative sympathy from afar or test sympathy’s geographical limits. Some Black authors, as we’ll see, picked up on this dynamic and creatively reworked it. The course culminates in the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved Black British abolitionist. Equiano suggests that his own history of physical and spiritual movement allows him to feel more deeply and more widely than his white readership can.

Department: English and Comparative Literature
T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
4 points

Details

ENGL UN3946