2018-2019 Academic Catalog

Apr 24, 2024

2018-2019 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

SCRN 115 - Cinephilia

What is cinephilia? Is it merely love for cinema? Does it imply, like Susan Sontag argues, the death of cinema? What is the value of concepts like nostalgia, memory, loss, when applied to films? Does the shift from analog to digital represent a crisis of loss of film? How can we make sense of this love, which in its very admission, indicates a sense of loss of the medium itself? How has this particular engagement with cinema developed historically with different sets of audiences? How does it change our understanding of global and hierarchical categorizations of film industries when cinephilia plots relationships of homage and fetishization across various borders-national, industrial, and between mainstream and avant garde? This course seeks to develop an understanding of film via the concept of cinephilia-the affective engagement with cinematic media. We will study aspects of the film form in mainstream, avant-garde, and indie cinema to understand film as a medium in order to grasp the various considerations of cinephilia along with concepts like auteurism, genre, mode, and camp, amongst others. Ultimately, we will be able to understand cinephilia as a cultural phenomenon and as a spectatorial relationship to film in a global and intertextual context of cinema.

The course fulfils the Aesthetic Perspective designation, which is part of PLS.

The course is a designated FYI experience.

Course Designation/Attribute: AP

Anticipated Terms Offered: biannually