FAVz062 Impure Harmonies: A New Poetics of Global Art Cinema

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2016
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 5 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Colin Burnett (lecturer), Mgr. Radomír D. Kokeš, Ph.D. (deputy)
Mgr. Radomír D. Kokeš, Ph.D. (assistant)
Mgr. Kateřina Šardická (assistant)
Guaranteed by
prof. PhDr. Jiří Voráč, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Patrycja Astrid Twardowska
Supplier department: Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
Mon 12. 12. 15:50–19:05 U34, Tue 13. 12. 15:50–19:05 U34, Wed 14. 12. 14:10–17:25 U34
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 10 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
Description: In his seminal study Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell addresses the major trends in art films of the 1950s and 1960s, the era of Western modernism. Filmmakers either experimented with new forms of ambiguity and abstraction (“art cinema narration”) or brought the patterning of serial music to the visual and sound cues of cinematic storytelling (“parametric narration”). How has the art film evolved since then? This series of lectures offers a new poetics of the art film, considered now in a global context. Most contemporary commentators who acknowledge art cinema’s global reach tend to eschew poetics in favor of other methods of analysis. Critic David Andrew takes this rejection of poetics to its logical conclusion, denying that the art film every stood as a distinct formal tradition. For many, “art cinema” has become a mobile signifier, a purely open category, underdetermined by the formal features we once took to be essential to the genre. These lectures argue otherwise. If the art film appears to have lost the formal distinctiveness of the two narrational modes described by Bordwell, it is because today’s art film, a truly transnational format that mixes local and boundary-crossing devices and tropes, is distinctive for its stylistic and narrative impurity.
Syllabus
  • In this series, I attempt to restore art cinema as a formal tradition by emphasizing the evolution of storytelling within this “super-genre.” These lectures examine four contemporary types of stylistic, narrative, and affective “impurity”: (1) the hybridization of modes; (2) the intrusions of humor; (3) the politicization of “pure” formal (parametric) play; and (4) the appropriation of “the popular.” These trends, I claim, have augured a new creative itinerary within global art cinema aesthetics, a paramodern art film that exists alongside the various modernisms, realisms, and postmodernisms of today’s fragmented festival market but takes on an interrogative role, “piggybacking” on modernist forms in order to discover new alterities (ironic, popular, activist, and local) within alternative narrative practice.
  • Lecture 1: “When is Art Cinema? Towards a New Poetics of the Narrative Avant-Garde”
  • Recommended reading: Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, “The Impurity of Art Cinema.” Global Art Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-27.
  • Lecture 2: “Between Philosophy and Music: Today’s Hybridization of Art Cinema and Parametric Narration”
  • Recommended reading: David Bordwell, “Art Cinema Narration,” Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 205-233; “Parametric Narration,” Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 274-310.
  • Recommended viewing: Le Quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010)
  • Lecture 3: “The Machinery of Feeling: Humor in the Art Film”
  • Recommended reading: Kristin Thompson, “Play Time: Comedy at the Edge of Perception,” Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 247-262.
  • Recommended viewing: The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002).
  • Lecture 4: “Parametric Resonances: Culture and Politics in the Cinema of Formal Play”
  • Recommended reading: Mark Betz, “Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence,” Global Art Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31-47.
  • Recommended viewing: Duvidha (Mani Kaul, 1973)
  • Lecture 5: “Popular Art Cinema”
  • Recommended viewing: Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)
  • Seminar: “Fast Art Cinema: The Alternative to the Alternative”
  • Recommended viewing: Sand Dollars (Guzman and Cardenas, 2014)
  • Recommended reading: Ira Jaffe, “Introduction,” Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014), 1-14.
Teaching methods
Lectures, Class Discussion, Obligatory Reading
Assessment methods
Written Test
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
The course is taught only once.
General note: Obligatory 100% attendance (with the exception of distance students who are allowed to miss 2 out of 6 sessions).
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
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