Course detail

The Art of Interpreting Film 1

FaVU-TAIFAcad. year: 2024/2025

This year's edition will focus on Hollywood and European art house films from the 1940s to 1970s. We will cover the USA, France, and Czechoslovakia. Special focus will be placed on the political construction of gender reflected in the films themselves and in film theory of the 1970s to present. The course is by no means a survey course of the history of cinema, but it implicitly follows a chronological line.

Language of instruction

English

Number of ECTS credits

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

Mgr. et MgA. Barbora Lungová

Department

Department of Art History and Theory (KTDU)

Offered to foreign students

The home faculty only

Entry knowledge

Students have to be able to read academic texts in English - the minimul recommened level is upper-intermediate and higher.

Rules for evaluation and completion of the course

Students will be assesed from discussing and writing short, in-class response papers about the assigned texts.
The answered quiz questions regarding each text for homework have to be uploaded to the shared drive a day before the class. Before the last class in the semester, students will have to have fulfilled at least 60% of the assignments in order to be able to finish the remaining assignments by the end of the exam period.
Students will be assessed from the regular, continuous work during the semester.

Min. 75% attendance at the MS Teams videoconferences, active and relevant participation in discussions regarding the film + accompanying text assigned for the respective week. Apart from spoken discussion, short online writing during the videocinference (chat or some other written form).

Aims

Students will be encouraged to improve their analytical and critical skills on the material of mostly european film classics from the 1950s - 1070s. Students should understand better the visual aspects of film - camera work, editing, the narrative subject vs the spectator, the open or hidden ideology behind the film, etc.
Students will improve their language and communication skills.
By studying theoretical articles about films they will be aware of the variety of interpretaion tools and strategies.
Students will widen their horizons in a discipline which is not customarily taught at a fine art faculty.
The course will cultivate students' critical and analytical abilities.
Students will be trained to understand the essential points of academic texts, but will at the same time learn to coherently voice their opinions and interpretations of a particular film/text in written form.
During the semester, students will write several short tests checking their reading progress.

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

Not applicable.

Basic literature

Alexander Dotty: Making Things Perfectly Queer (EN)
Andrea Slováková: Co je nového ve filmové vědě. (EN)
Bordwell and Thompson - Film History (EN)
Bordwell and Thompson: Film Art: An Introduction (EN)
Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (EN)
Robert J. Corber: Cold War Femme. Lesbianism, National Identity, and Holywood Cinema. (EN)
Robert J. Corber: In the Name of National Security. Hitchcock, Homophobia, and (EN)
Robin Wood: Hitchcok's Films Revisited (EN)

Type of course unit

Lecture

13 hod., optionally

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. et MgA. Barbora Lungová

Syllabus

1. Hollywood melodrama, musical, and film noir of the 1940s and 1950. Dawid Bordwell and Christine Thompson and their formal analysis of film language. Normality vs. deviance in classical Hollywood narratives. Billy Wilder: Sunset Boullevard.
2.Todd Haynes and the reflection of normalizing 1950s in postmodern Hollywood: Far From Heaven.
3. Hollywood classical cinema of the 1950s: Hitchcock, family romance, and homophobia. North By Northwest. Robert J. Corber: In the Name of National Security> Hithcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America.
4. Art cinema and high modernism in European cinema. Michelangelo Antonioni and THe Passenger. Typology of modernist genres according to Kovács.
5. POstmodern cinema: David Lynch: Twin Peaks (Fire Walk With Me)
7. Lynch: Twin Peaks III. The quest as white man's Deal in TV format. Kovacs: Screening Modernism.
8. 1960s. French New Wave. Agnes Varga. Sans toit ni loi (1988) - a different version of a quest - a homeless girl in her 20s.
9. Holywood romanticising of a female vagabond: Angelina Jollie in Foxfire (1996).
10. Sophia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides (1999).
11. Catherine Breillat. Bluebeard (2009). A feminist and drastic reinterpretation of the classic fairy tale.
12. Desiréé Akhavan. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. (2018) When education turns horribly wrong.

Seminar

26 hod., optionally

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. et MgA. Barbora Lungová

VUT

Faculties

University Institutes

Parts

The Art of Interpreting Film 1

Type of course unit