MA in Film and Literature 2017-18

Autumn Term:
Core Module: Film/Literature Encounters

Tutors:
Dr Michael McCluskey
Dr Erica Sheen

Screenings:
Tuesdays 9.00 in BS005
Thursdays 13.00 in BS005

Seminar:
Fridays 14.00 BS007

Week 2: The Cinematic City/Michael McCluskey

Screenings
Rien que les heures (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, France, 1926)
A Propos de Nice (dir. Jean Vigo, France, 1931)
London (dir. Patrick Keiller, UK, 1994)

This seminar looks at cinematic studies of the city as a way of exploring geographical
approaches to film and literary analysis. We start with a look at the ‘city symphonies’ of the
1920s: films that celebrate the crowds, machines, andstructures that constitute urban
modernity. The expansion of European and American cities in the early twentieth century
was a source of inspiration for both writers and filmmakers, and we make connections
between these through their shared interests in architecture, urban rhythms, social patterns,
and orchestrated movements. We also consider more recent examples of these examinations
of urban life and the ways in which they shape our own perceptions of particular cities such
as London, New York, and Los Angeles. Walking through the city will be a particular point
of focus as we examine the activities of individuals and crowds, efforts to control their
movements, and the ‘tactics’ used to disrupt order.
Required reading:
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) in The Blackwell City Reader eds.
Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘The Attractions of the Cinematic City’, Screen 53.3 (2012), pp. 209-
227.
Seth Feldman, ‘Peace Between Man and Machine: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie
Camera’ in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barrie Keith Grant and Jeannette
Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2013).
Giuliana Bruno, ‘Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric’ in Cities in
Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, eds. Andrew Webber and Emma
Wilson (London: Wallflower Press, 2008).

Suggested reading:
Michel de Certeau, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ in The Blackwell City Reader eds. Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Patrick Keiller, ‘Urban Space and Early Film’ in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and
the Modern Metropolis eds. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London: Wallflower Press,
2008).

Suggested viewing:
Los Angeles Plays Itself (US, 2003)
Of Time and the City (UK, 2008)

Week 3: Medium Specificity/Erica Sheen

Screenings
NT Encore, Hamlet (at CityScreen, Thursday Week 2 at 19.00)
RSC Live Relay, Coriolanus (CityScreen Wednesday Week 3 at 19.00)
Additional sessions:
 Shakespeare Silents - illustrated lecture with Prof Judith Buchanan, Friday Week 2
at 17.00 (following seminar)
 Introduction to live broadcast theatre by Judith Buchanan, Thursday Week 3 at
17.00 in the Treehouse/BS008.
Required reading:
Either or both Shakespeare: Hamlet; Coriolanus
André Bazin, ‘In Defence of Mixed Cinema’ and ‘Theater and Cinema’ in What is Cinema?
Vol 1 (California 1968), pp 53-75 and 76-124.
Stanley Cavell, ‘The medium and media of film’ in The World Viewed (Harvard 1979) pp
68-73
Jacques Rancière, ‘An interview…on medium specificity’ in Journal of Art 8.1. (2007) pp
99-101
Jacques Rancière, ‘What medium can mean’ in Parrhesia 11 (2011) pp 25-43
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Prologue
P. Nicklas, and E. Voigts ‘Adaptation, Transmedia Storytelling and Participatory Culture,’
Adaptation 6:2 (2013) pp139–142.
Sarah Cardwell, ‘Present(ing) Tense: Temporality and Tense in Comparative Theories of
Literature-Film Adaptation’ , Scope July 2000 at
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2000/july-2000/cardwell.pdf

Susanne Greenhalgh, ed., ‘Special Performance Reviews Section: Live Cinema Relays of
Shakespearean Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin 32.2 (2014),Introduction.
John Wyver, ‘Screening the RSC stage: the 2014 Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema
broadcasts’, Shakespeare11.3 (2015)

This seminar introduces the concept of medium specificity, and considers adaptation and
transmediality as processes of textual transmission which confirm or test this idea. Our ‘case
study’ – the most adapted and transmediated of all authors – is Shakespeare, and we are
pleased to welcome Judith Buchanan to talk to us about Shakespeare silent and live broadcast
theatre.

Week 4: Dialogue - Talking and the ‘Talkie’ /Michael McCluskey -

Screenings
It Happened One Night (dir. Frank Capra, USA, 1934)
The Lady Vanishes (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1938)
With the introduction of sound to cinema in the late 1920s, the increase in radio listening, and
the spread of telephones, ‘talk’ became not just a means of communicating information in
interpersonal exchanges but a focal point of film, literature, and, more broadly, interwar
culture. In this seminar we talk about ‘talk’ and the use of dialogue in conveying information,
constructing character, creating insiders and outsiders, and commenting on the sound of
cinema itself. To initiate these discussions we turn to American and British cinema of the
1930s and its celebration of snappy dialogue. We’ll consider these films alongside the use of
dialogue in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies and other writings of the period. Coded
exchanges, listening in, gossip, miscommunication, and mistaken identity all factor into the
different forms of talk. These will help us to analyse conversation as a circuit that connects
individuals and generates its own forms of meaning.

Required reading:
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1935)
Sarah Kozloff, ‘Introduction: The Study of Filmic Speech’ and ‘Chapter One: The Functions
of Dialogue in Narrative Cinema’, Overhearing Film Dialogue (London: University of
California Press, 2000).

Suggested reading:
Sarah Kozloff, ‘Chapter Three: Integration’ and ‘Chapter Five: Word Play: Dialogue in
Screwball Comedies’, Overhearing Film Dialogue (London: University of California Press,
2000).
David Lodge, ‘Waugh’s Comic Wasteland’, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays
(London: Harvard University Press, 2002).
James Wierzbicki, ‘Soundtrack “Design” in Hitchcock’s Thriller Sextet’, The New
Soundtrack 1:2 (2011), pp. 157-175.

Suggested viewing:
Blackmail (UK, 1929)
Easy Living (US, 1937)
His Girl Friday (US, 1940)
Bright Young Things (UK, 2003)
Week 5: Adaptation and the derivative work / Erica Sheen -

Screenings
Rear Window (Hitchcock 1954)
A Man Escaped (Bresson 1956)

Required reading:
We will continue to discuss our reading on medium specificity and add to it:
John Belton, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (CUP 2000)
Stefan Sharrf, The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Southern Ill., 2001)_
Cornell Woolrich, ‘It Had to be Murder’ (1950) - pdf in VLE
Robert Bresson, trans J. Griffin, Notes on the Cinematographer (Green Integer 1997).
Joseph Cunneen, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film (Bloomsbury 2005)
James Quandt, Robert Bresson (Ontario Cinematheque 1998)
Andre Devigny, trans Peter Green, A Man Escaped (1958) - excerpts in VLE
Rhonda Baker, Media Law: A User's Guide (Chapman and Hall 1995), 178 - pdf on VLE

Rear Window and A Man Escaped share a surprisingly similar scenario: a man ‘captured’ in
what is effectively the space of the frame, and exercising his imagination in resistance to his
constraints. In every other respect they are polar contrasts: one exemplifies the ‘industrial’
Hollywood production system; the other is the work of a director who defies categorisation,
even in post-war France. In this seminar we will consider i) contrasting approaches to
adaptation as a process of creative, technical and technological transfer between two media;
ii) the questions of intellectual property that derive from this. We will examine the
documentation relating to the famous ‘Rear Window Case’, and contrast the modes of
performance presented in these two films: the star system ; and Bresson’s concept of the
‘modèle’.

Week 6: Reading Week: no classes or screenings/ submission of procedural essay

Week 7: Surveillance and the Senses of Cinema/Michael McCluskey

Screenings
Blow Up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966)
The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1971)

In this seminar we look at the links between cinema and surveillance and consider how
technology extends our senses of sight and sound and shape our perception of the world
around us. We start with ideas about phenomenology and film: the experience cinema has on
the body beyond just its ‘visual pleasures’. Film can be seen as a multi-sensory experience,
and we’ll discuss theoretical approaches for analysing cinema’s appeal to sensations beyond
sight. We’ll then focus on film and the opportunities it creates for watching people,
examining movements, listening in, and even impacting behaviour. The surveillance of
citizens has been a longstanding part of state governance. We’ll discuss the recording of our
activities as part of everyday security and the threats such forms of control bring to our civic
freedoms. But we’ll also consider how prosthetic technologies enhance our abilities to engage
with others and understand our own embodied experiences.

Required reading:
David Lyon, ‘Introduction’, Surveillance Society Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 2002).
Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Lev Manovich ,’ Visual Technologies as Cognitive Prosthesis: A Short History of the
Externalization of the Mind’, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a
Biocultural Future ed. by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
W. Russell Gray, ‘Tuning into The Conversation Twenty-five Years Later’, Journal of
Popular Culture vol. 33. issue 2 (Fall 1999) 123-30.

Suggested reading:
Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision ed. by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio
Tinazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
David Mellor, ‘“Fragments of an unknowable whole”: Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966’, Visual Culture in Britain vol. 8,
no. 2 (2007), 45-61.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002).
Frank P Tomasulo, ‘Phenomenology: Philosophy and Media Theory- An Introduction’ in
Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 12, no. 3, 1-8.
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: a Phenomenology of Film Experience (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (London: Duke University Press, 2000).

Suggested viewing:
M (dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1931)
Blow Out (dir. Brian De Palma, USA, 1981)
Enemy of the State (dir. Tony Scott, USA, 1998)
Caché (dir. Michael Haneke, France and Germany, 2005)

Week 8: Human-machine / Erica Sheen

Screenings
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott 1982/2007)
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017) (at a local cinema, tba)
Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, Channel 4, dates/times tba.

Required reading:
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968)
Excerpts from graphic novel, hard copies circulated/photocopy
Philip K Dick, Selected Stories tbc

Stephen Mulhall, ‘Picturing the Human (Body and Soul): A Reading of Blade Runner’ in
Film and Philosophy 1:87-104 (2007) - on VLE
Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto – on VLE
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Media and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Critical reading on Blade Runner from JSTOR and Project Muse.

We will take the opportunity of the long-awaited release of the sequel of this cult film, and
the accompanying series of Dick short story adaptations, to review i) the relation between
Dick’s novel and the original film, and ii) the relationship between both of them and these
new productions. Drawing on reading and ideas from our previous seminars, we will discuss
the concept of the sequel and try to decide what kind of theoretical framework it requires.
We will think forward to the topic of next seminar – memory, one of the defining themes of
the original film. What becomes of this concern in the new release…?

Week 9: Memory / Michael McCluskey

Screenings
Beaches of Agnès (dir. Agnès Varda, France, 2008)
Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, Israel, 2008)

Remembering past events, emotions, places, and experiences is a process that includes the
construction of narrative and disruption of time. This seminar looks into the (re)construction
of the past and its intermingling with the present through films and writings about memory.
In Beaches of Agnès, filmmaker Agnès Varda weaves together excerpts from her films, shots
of her revisiting their locations, and personal memories. Waltz with Bashir is a documentary
that uses animation to represent the seemingly unrepresentable: the trauma of war as
experienced by one soldier. Both films can help us to consider theories of memory and
trauma, the collective memory that binds groups, memorial sites, and suppressed thoughts.
‘It’s difficult to separate the line between the past and the present’, says the subject of the
film Grey Gardens, and in this seminar we’ll discuss how the past informs our experience of
the present and the present shapes our understanding of the past.

Required reading:
Joanne Garde-Hansen, ‘Chapter One: Memory Studies and Media Studies’, Media and
Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925), Theories of Memory: A
Reader eds. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007).
Russell Kilbourn, ‘Introduction: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Return of Film as
Memory’, Cinema, Memory, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010).
Garrett Stewart, ‘Screen Memory in Waltz with Bashir’, Killer Images: Documentary Film,
Memory and the Performance of Violence eds. Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer
(London: Wallflower Press, 2012).

Suggested reading:
Alison Smith, ‘Chapter Five: Time and Memory’, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998).
Joanne Garde-Hansen, ‘Chapter Two: Personal, Collective, Mediated and New Memory
Discourse’, Media and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Joram ten Brink, ‘Animating Trauma: Waltz with Bashir, David Polonsky’, Killer Images:
Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence eds. Joram ten Brink and
Joshua Oppenheimer (London: Wallflower Press, 2012).
Jenny Chamarette, ‘Spectral Bodies, Temporalised Spaces: Agnès Varda's Motile Gestures of
Mourning and Memorial’, Image & Narrative 12:2 (2011)
[http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/144]

Suggested viewing:
Mirror (USSR, 1975)
Grey Gardens (US, 1975)
Memento (USA, 2000)

Week 10: Poetry and film / Erica Sheen + guests

Screenings:
The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami 1999)
Paterson (Jarmusch 2017)

What happens when you put a camera in front of poetry? Does it steal its soul?

Required reading:
William Carlo Williams, ‘Paterson’, and Forough Farrokhzad, ‘The wind will carry us’ and
other poems, http://www.forughfarrokhzad.org/selectedworks/selectedworks1.php
Scott MacDonald, ‘Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication’ Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2006), pp. 37- 58