FAVz018 Placing the Audience in Cinema History

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2009
Extent and Intensity
0/0/0. 5 credit(s). Recommended Type of Completion: k (colloquium). Other types of completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Professor Jeffrey Klenotic (lecturer)
doc. Mgr. Lucie Česálková, Ph.D. (alternate examiner)
Guaranteed by
doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: doc. Mgr. Lucie Česálková, Ph.D.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 120 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/120, only registered: 0/120, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/120
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 19 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
This series of lectures examines the history of American cinema from the ground up, using the theoretical framework of cultural studies and the analytical methods of spatial history to explore the social experience of audiences, the cultural meanings of cinema attendance, and the distribution of exhibition sites through space and time. The series begins with a review of traditional approaches to film audiences and exhibition, and then proceeds with several historically specific and geographically grounded case studies. The final lectures introduce geographic information system technology (GIS) and discuss the potential of GIS analysis and visualization methods for a spatial history of cinemas and audiences. The temporal focus of the lectures will range from early cinema to cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.
Syllabus
  • Lecture One: Reading: Robert C. Allen, Relocating American Film History: The Problem of the Empirical, Cultural Studies 20:1 (2006), pp. 48-88. Paul G. Cressey, The Motion Picture Experience as Modified by Social Background and Personality, American Sociological Review 3 ltrch (August 1938), pp. 516-525. Lecture Two: Reading: Kathryn H. Fuller, You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town: The Struggle Between Urban and Small-Town Exhibition in the Picture Palace Era, in At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Roy Rosenzweig, From Rum Shop to Rialto, in Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lecture Three: Reading: Richard Butsch, American Movie Audiences of the 1930s, International Labor and Working-Class History 59 (2001), pp. 106-120. Richard Maltby, On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History From Below, Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 9:2 (2006), pp. 74-96. Lecture Four: Reading: Paul G. 0 Cressey, The Community--A Social Setting for the Motion Picture, in Children and the Movies, eds. Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie and Kathryn H. Fuller (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1996). Richard deCordova, Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, the Hays Office, and Saturday Matinees, Camera Obscura 23 (1990), pp. 91-107. Lectures Five and Six: Reading: Robert C. Allen, The Place of Space in Film Historiography, Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 9:2 (2006), pp. 15-27. Using GIS to Visualize Historical Data, In: Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, chapter 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data Through Grounded Theory and Visualization, Environment and Planning A 38 (2006), pp. 2021-2037. Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, California: ESRI Press, 2008).
Teaching methods
Lecture elaborates student's ability to analyse the space of film screening in historical development of cinema. Presuposes home study of prescribed literature.
Assessment methods
Full time students: 100% presence at the lectures is required. Distance students: two absences are tolerated. Colloquium: written test.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
Information on completion of the course: Full time students: 100% presence at the lectures is required. Distance students: two absences are tolerated.
The course is taught only once.
The course is taught: in blocks.

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