Syllabus
Graduate Seminar: Theory
Spring 2008 – FILM R4502/001
Mondays, 2-5 p.m.
The Philosophical Turn: Deleuze, Frampton, Žižek
Dr. David Sterritt
Office hours: By appointment, before and after class
djsterritt@aol.com / www.DavidSterritt.com
Course schedule
Introduction:
A Century of Film Theory
January 28 – Overview of film-theoretical concepts
Issues in classical film theory: medium specificity; realist and
formative paradigms; dialectical montage; the ontology of the
photographic image; auteurism.
Issues in contemporary film theory: semiotics; dialogics; psychoanalytic
and cognitive paradigms; feminist criticism; postmodernism and
poststructuralism; film historiography; cultural studies.
Topic 1
Gilles Deleuze, Philosophy, and Film
Download: The Bionic Eye
February 4 – The philosophy of Henri Bergson
Roots of Deleuze’s film theory in Bergson’s philosophical ideas.
Challenging the valuation of space over time in Western thought.
Matter and memory. Frames and sets. The élan vital.
Bergsonian dualisms: quantity and quality, time and duration, actual
and virtual, intellect and intuition, being and becoming.
Deleuzian concepts: the body without organs; the molar and the
molecular; the rhizome; techne and the possibilities of thought;
desiring machines and spiritual automata; sensorimotor montage,
irrational montage.
Deleuze and
Guattari: the body without organs; schizoanalysis vs. psychoanalysis;
territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization; life,
thought, and art as processes of infinite becoming.
Download: Machinic Vision
February 11 – The Movement-Image
The ubiquity of consciousness. The center of indeterminacy. The
any-space-whatever. The fundamental movement-images: perception-image,
action-image, and affection-image. The frame, the shot, the cut, and
the open whole. Configurations of durée in varieties of montage:
organic, dialectic, quantitative, intensive. The sign according to C.S.
Peirce.
February 18 – The Time-Image
The 1940s as cinematic pivot point. The rupture of the sensorimotor
system. Intuition and the rise of the irrational cut. Opsigns,
sonsigns, lectosigns, and more. Peaks of present, sheets of past.
Disturbances of memory, failures of recognition. Splitting temporality:
the crystal-image as critical juncture of past and present, virtual and
actual, subjective and objective.
February 25 – Critiquing Deleuze
How justified are Deleuze’s metaphysics? Is schizoanalytic film theory
a useful alternative to the psychoanalytic perspective? What arguments
might cognitive psychology raise against it? How valid is Deleuze’s
periodization of the great divide between classical movement-image and
modernist time-image? Is his auteurism a useful heuristic or an
arbitrary aesthetic? Is the edifice of Deleuzian theory an abstract
intellectual scheme, opposite to the spirit of Bergsonism, or a
valuable new means of conjoining the ideation of intuitive philosophy
with the élan vital of creative cinema?
Download: A Thousand Trails to Work With Deleuze
Topic 2
Daniel Frampton and Film-Philosophy
March 3 – Filmosophy: cinema as thought, thought as cinema
Building on Deleuze’s innovations. Transcending phenomenology, biology,
and subjectivity. Personifying movies. Film-beings and film-thinking.
Filmind = reality + thought – metaphysics. Beyond photography: fluid
cinema and the future of movies.
"Filmosophy" review, Senses of Cinema
March 10 – Filmosophy as a critical tool
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the filmosophical system? How
useful are its discourses to those of film theory and criticism? Do
filmosophical readings illuminate the films they examine?
Topic 3
Slavoj Žižek and psychoanalysis as philosophy
March 24 – Jacques Lacan and radical psychoanalysis
Freud and Lacan. The mirror stage and méconnaissance. The real, the
imaginary, and the symbolic. The Name of the Father. The transcendental
signifier. “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Drives and
desires. The sinthome. Mathemes.
March 31 – Cinema, subjectivity, and enjoyment
Lacan, Marx, Hegel. Ideology, the big Other, and the objet petit-a.
Sexuation. Jouissance and the limits of pleasure. The anarchic id and
the mad-obscene superego. Realism, modernism, postmodernism.
April 7 – A Pervert’s Guide to Slavoj Žižek
Film, fantasy, and the symbolic network. The ridiculous sublime. Cinema
and the stain. Popular culture as Lacanian phenomenology.
David Sterritt's "Filmosophy" review, Forthcoming in "Film International"
April 14 – Student presentations
April 21 – Student presentations
April 28 – Student presentations
May 5 – Student presentations
Course requirements
In
addition to attending all seminar sessions, participating in
discussions, and completing all reading assignments, students will
write a term paper of 15-20 pages, due at the last session on May 5. As
part of the preparation for this, each student will give a presentation
on his/her research during one of the last four sessions, as listed
above. The order of these presentations will be determined in intense
high-level negotiations as the time draws near.
Reading assignments
Where
entire books are listed for a particular date, more specific readings
will be given in class. Students are expected to familiarize themselves
with these books thoroughly and carefully, so as to use them readily in
preparing and writing their final projects.
January 28 -- Amy
Herzog, “Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and
the Question of Cinema.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
Visual Studies (2000).
<http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/herzog.htm>
February 4 – Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
February 11 -- Donato
Totaro, “Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project,” Part 1. offscreen
(31 March 1999).
<http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html>
February
18 -- Donato Totaro, “Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project,” Part
2. offscreen (31 March 1999).
<http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2.html>
February
25 – George Heard Hamilton, “Cézanne, Bergson and the Image of Time.”
College Art Journal 16:1 (Autumn 1956), 2-12. (handout)
March 3 – Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy.
March 3 – David Sterritt, “Filmosophy.” Film International 2008.2 (2008). (handout)
March 24 – Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
March 31 – Todd McGowan, “Introduction: Enjoying the Cinema.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 1:3 (2007).
<http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/57/119>
April 7 – Steven Shaviro, “Žižek on Deleuze.” The Pinocchio Theory. <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=229>
Required books
Available at Book Culture on 112th Street
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Recommended book
Available at Book Culture on 112th Street
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Additional books of interest
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
(Bergson’s second book in the authorized translation of the fifth edition published in 1908.)
Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
(A
lucidly written, if somewhat repetitious, exposition of Bergson’s key
ideas, with occasional specific references to Deleuze and cinema.)
D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
(Not easy reading, but authoritative.)
Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum, 2006.
(A
well-written scholarly account of Deleuze’s central concepts, often
using his film theories as gateways to his thinking on other issues.)