UC SANTA BARBARA

Undergraduate - Winter - 2024

Film Theory – W24

Details

Winter - 2024
192FT
5

Description

This course considers classic and contemporary texts by writers who have developed what we currently understand to be film theory, and considers how we theorize cinema as format, narrative, and experience. We consider visual projection as a source of power, cognition, and set of cultural formations keyed into Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon. An important emphasis in this course is refining skills on reading texts that theorize film as a medium. This includes strategies of embodying language as performance and enactment. This course is an upper division core course that meets twice per week, and includes discussion sections with TAs. An honors section also meets weekly. The course involves weekly lectures, screenings, in-class group work, weekly writing assignments, midterm assignment, final exam, and final paper.