Course Description & Goals

This course will serve as an introduction to thinking and writing critically about film. On a primary level, the goal of this course is to strengthen students' skills in the areas of writing and research. This will be accomplished through workshop-style writing exercises and in-class presentations, research assignments, and thoughtful close-reading of critical writing. Students will learn to recognize and craft essays that move beyond description into the realm of original argumentation, and they should expect that their own writings will be held to a similar level of scrutiny as those on our reading list.

The screenings, readings, and assignments will be organized around the theme of Representations of Technology. The emphasis, in each case, will be on close-reading, but in the overall course of synthesizing these writings and films, we will come to consider the formal and narrative conventions of representations of technology, the political and cinematic contexts of our materials, and the history and theory of machines and machine culture. The films that we are watching trace the many influences that technologies have had on our lives, from our means of communicating and work habits to our understandings of time and space. The development of the technologies referenced, and the films and writings themselves, point to the evolution of American life, fears, and fantasies. Films: Metropolis, The Man With a Movie Camera, Modern Times, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Conversation, Blade Runner, Tron, WarGames, Videodrome.