Subjects

Class time and place:
Tues. 08.30–11.25, F.A.M.U. in the projection hall in Room 124 on the first floor, Lažanský palác, Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Praha 1

Faculty:
doc. Erik S. Roraback, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
Docent, Habilitation: Charles University, Faculty of Arts; Dir., American Literature & Cultural-Studies, Charles University; FAMU-International, 2003–present; Affiliate Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2019–present; University Visiting Research Fellowship, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK, 2014–23; Visiting Scholar, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2015–19; Visiting Researcher, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany 2004–14; Visiting Professor, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France 2005; Doctor of Philosophy (viva voce examiners, Terry Eagleton, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford & Maud Ellmann, King’s College, University of Cambridge) & College Tutor (Magdalen College & Mansfield College), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Oxford/École Normal Supérieure Exchange, Paris, France; Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholar, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Bachelor of Arts, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA; Pomona College Program (Dir., All Souls College) at University College, Oxford

Contact:
e-mail: erik.roraback@famu.cz or erik.roraback@ff.cuni.cz

Individual web site:
www.erikroraback.com

Office hours:
After seminar and by appointment; to be announced, Room 219c, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Jana Palacha 1/2, Prague 1

Objectives:
The aim of this course is to awaken for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these will promote an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms of “circulation”. The seminar thus draws on, and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus will be evaluated anew. Attention will be given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many utopian forms of thinking and looking. In so doing, we consider arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be given critical coverage.

Critical and theoretical literature engaged will include film aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy from Theodor Adorno (Germany), Giorgio Agamben (Italy), Nico Baumbach (USA), André Bazin (France), Jonathan Beller (USA), Walter Benjamin (Germany), Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit (USA), Jan Campbell (UK), David A. Cook (USA), Gilles Deleuze (France), Georges Didi-Huberman (France), Mark Fisher (UK), Owen Hulatt (USA), Fredric Jameson (USA), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Hannah Patterson (USA), Jacques Rancière (France), Josh Robinson (USA), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czechia), Nicolás Salazar Sutil (UK), Steven Shaviro (USA), Bernard Stiegler, (France), Robert T. Tally Jr. (USA), François Truffaut (France), and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK). Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt (USA), inter alia, will also be engaged. All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles. Clips and special features will also be shown. The course is conducted in English and consists of three clock-hour-long sessions (i.e., four academic hours) to allow sufficient time for both the screenings and for seminar lecture/discussion. Strategically, we shall engage our target pictures in an unorthodox counter chronological way in order to undercut overly facile teleological ways of thinking and of reasoning; it will also provide us with a different perspective on the development of the cultural system of film.

Programs:
FAMU-International; CDM: e.g., CDM Digital Media, CDM2, CDM2 Scriptwriting, CDM3; CET/Film Production; CIEE; DAMU Arts Management; DAMU Directing; Free Mover; Photography; PTS; ERASMUS-FAMU/HAMU; Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory (core course) and American Literature and Cultural Studies (elective course) (Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University)

Course Requirements:
To receive credit for the seminar students must
1) have no more than two absences out of the thirteen total weekly sessions; for each absence beyond one your course grade will be lowered a full letter grade; arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that full session.
2) give one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s) for that week
3) submit a mid-term essay and
4) produce a final essay.

Final essay (3000 words; due 20 May): 30%,
Mid-term essay (1500 words; due 8 April): 20%,
Oral presentation: 20%,
Attendance and participation: 30%.

Essay topics will be distributed at least three weeks before they are due.<br>
Arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that session. During class time, mobile phones are to be off and computers may be on for note-taking only and not for doing work online.

Last update: Roraback Erik Sherman, doc., D.Phil. (14.12.2024)

Material:

DVD and Blu-ray videos: see schedule; selections from the following critical and theoretical texts will be available in a course-reader or: will be adduced in the lectures or readings authored by the instructor:

Agamben, Giorgio: Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Zone, 2007).

_____ . Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (Verso, 2007).

Baumbach, Nico: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia, 2019).

Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth/New England, 2006).

Benjamin, Walter: selected texts from the series of volumes with Harvard Univ. Press to be announced.

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit: Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Harvard, 1993).

_____ . Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (BFI, 2004).

Bird, Robert: Andrei Rublev. (BFI, 2004).

Campbell, Jan. Film & Cinema Spectatorship (Polity, 2005).

Casetti, Francesco: Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, trans. Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo (Columbia, 2008).

Conrad, Peter: The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and Imagination (Thames & Hudson, 2021).

_____ . The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles (Faber & Faber, 2003).

Cook, David A.: A History of Narrative Film (Norton, 2004).

Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minnesota, 1986).

_____ . Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta(Minnesota, 1989).

Didi-Huberman, Georges: The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, trans. Shane B. Lillis. (RIC, 2018)/MIT, 2018).

Docherty, Thomas: Literature and Capital (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Durham, Scott and Dilip Gaonkar, With an afterword by Jacques Rancière: Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics (Northwestern, 2019).

Fisher, Mark: The Weird And The Eerie (Repeater, 2016).

Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Canongate, 2005).

Jameson, Fredric: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005).

_____ . Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (Verso, 2016).

_____ . The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana, 1995).

Kline, T. Jefferson, ed. Agnès Varda: Interviews (Mississippi, 2014).

Lambert, Gregg: “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze” in Flaxman, Gregory, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minnesota, 2000).

Le Fanu, Mark: “Stalker” in The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (BFI, 1987) pp. 92–107.

Luhmann, Niklas: The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

McGowan, Todd: The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (SUNY, 2007).

Margulies, Ivone: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Duke, 1996).

Morin, Edgar: The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Morimer (Minnesota, 2005).

_____ . The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, foreword Lorraine Mortimer (Minnesota, 2005).

Morrison, James and Thomas Schur. The Films of Terrence Malick. (Praeger, 2003).

Morton, Timothy. All Art is Ecological (Penguin, 2018).

Nancy, Jean-Luc: The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, trans. with an intro. François Raffoul and David Pettigew (Albany: SUNY P, 2007).

Naremore, James: The Magic World of Orson Welles (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978 reprinted at Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1989).

Patterson, Hannah: “Two Characters in Search of a Direction: Motivation and the Construction of Identity in Badlands” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (Wallflower, 2003) pp. 24–36.

Rancière, Jacques: Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Berg, 2006).

_____ . The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2007).

Richards, Rashna Wadia and David T. Johnson: For the Love of Cinema: Teaching our Passion In and Outside of the Classroom (Indiana, 2017).

Roraback, Erik S.: a select band of essays adduced below (some published and / or presented at conferences) from a two-volume work that is being prepared for publication.

Working title: Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought.

Salazar Sutil, Nicolás: Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement (MIT, 2015).

Schmid, Marion. “The Visual Artist’s Gaze Agnès Varda’s Intermedial Layering” in Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts (Edinburgh, 2019) pp. 95–105.

Shaviro, Steven: The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 2 (Minnesota, 1993).

Stiegler, Bernard: Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, 2010).

Tally, Robert T. Jr.: Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-System (Palgrave

Macmillan, 2013)

Thomsen, Christian Braad: “The Double Man”, “Bavaria and Hollywood” and “Querelle” in Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (Faber and Faber, 1997) pp. 1–44, 101–10,

and 302–11.

Truffaut, François: “Foreword” to André Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical View (Acrobat, 1978), pp. 1–27.

Wagner, Keith B., Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer, eds.. afterword Fredric Jameson: Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers, 2022).

Žižek, Slavoj, ed.: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Verso, 2010).

Last update: Roraback Erik Sherman, doc., D.Phil. (14.12.2024)

seminář

Last update: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (17.09.2014)

Class time and place:
Tues. 08.30–11.25, F.A.M.U. in the projection hall on the first floor, Lažanský palác, Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Praha 1

Faculty:
doc. Erik S. Roraback, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
Docent, Habilitation: Charles University, Faculty of Arts; Director, American Literature and Cultural-Studies, Charles University; FAMU-International, 2003–present; Affiliate Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2019–present; University Visiting Research Fellowship, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK 2014–23; Visiting Scholar, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2015–19; Visiting Researcher, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany 2004–14; Visiting Professor, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France 2005; Doctor of Philosophy and College Tutor (Magdalen College and Mansfield College), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Oxford/École Normal Supérieure Exchange, Paris, France; Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholar, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Bachelor of Arts, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA; Pomona College Program (dir. All Souls College, Oxford) at University College, Oxford/Stanford University Centre in Oxford; University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Contact:
e-mail: erik.roraback@famu.cz or erik.roraback@ff.cuni.cz

Individual web site:
www.erikroraback.com

Office hours:
After seminar and by appointment; to be announced, Room 219c, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Jana Palacha 1/2, Prague 1

Objectives:
The aim of this course is to awaken for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetic, cultural capital and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these will promote an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms of “circulation”. The seminar thus draws on, and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), and Orson Welles (USA). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus will be evaluated anew. Attention will be given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many utopian forms of thinking and looking. In so doing, we consider arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture will also be given critical coverage.

Critical and theoretical literature engaged will include film aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy from Theodor Adorno (Germany), Giorgio Agamben (Italy), Nico Baumbach (USA), André Bazin (France), Jonathan Beller (USA), Walter Benjamin (Germany), Leo Bersani-Ulysse Dutoit (USA), Jan Campbell (UK), David A. Cook (USA), Gilles Deleuze (France), Georges Didi-Huberman (France), Owen Hulatt (USA), Fredric Jameson (USA), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Todd McGowan (USA), Edgar Morin (France), Hannah Patterson (USA), Jacques Rancière (France), Josh Robinson (USA), Erik S. Roraback (USA/Czech Republic), Nicolás Salazar Sutil (UK), Steven Shaviro (USA), Bernard Stiegler, (France), François Truffaut (France), and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia/UK). Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt (USA), inter alia, will also be engaged. All films are either in English or have English inter-titles or sub-titles. Clips and special features will also be shown. The course is conducted in English and consists of three clock hour long sessions (i.e., four academic hours) to allow sufficient time for both the screenings and for seminar lecture/discussion. Strategically, we shall engage our target pictures in an unorthodox counter chronological way in order to undercut overly facile teleological ways of thinking and of reasoning; it will also provide us with a different perspective on the development of the cultural system of film.

Programs:
FAMU-International; CDM: e.g., CDM Digital Media, CDM2, CDM2 Scriptwriting, CDM3; CET/Film Production; CIEE; DAMU Arts Management; DAMU Directing; Free Mover; Photography; PTS; ERASMUS-FAMU/HAMU/Charles University; Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory (core course) and American Literature and Cultural Studies (elective course) (Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University).

Course Requirements:
To receive credit for the seminar students must
1) have no more than two absences out of the thirteen total weekly sessions; for each absence beyond one your course grade will be lowered a full letter grade; arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that full session.
2) give one oral presentation on a film and on the required text(s) for that week
3) submit a mid-term essay and
4) produce a final essay.

Final essay (3000 words; due 20 May): 30%,
Mid-term essay (1500 words; due 8 April): 20%,
Oral presentation: 20%,
Attendance and participation: 30%.

Essay topics will be distributed at least three weeks before they are due.
Arriving more than ten minutes late at the beginning of the seminar or leaving early will be considered an absence for that session. During class time, mobile phones are to be off and computers may be on for note-taking only and not for doing work online.

Weekly Schedule:
11 and 18 February: American Neo-Noir and the American Sublime
Pre-film lecture and screening:
Badlands (1974, 95 min., dir. Terrence Malick); The Thin Red Line
(1998, 170 min., dir. Terrence Malick)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: J. Morrison and Thomas Schur: The Films of Terrence Malick.
(Praeger, 2003) pp. 59–67.
H. Patterson: “Two Characters in Search of a Direction: Motivation
and the Construction of Identity in Badlands” in The Cinema of
Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (Wallflower, 2003) pp.
24–36.
E. Roraback: Revised version of an essay first presented as “The
Dialectic of Cinema and Silence; or, Forms and Structures for
Moving Across Badlands (1974)” at the Olomouc International
Symposium on American Studies, ‘America in Motion’, 7–10 September
2008, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia. Current title: “Cinema
and Silence; or, Forms and Structures for Traversing the Riches of
Malick’s Badlands (1973).”
E. Roraback: Revised version of “Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red
Line (1998) and Circulating within the Heideggerian Cinematic
Image” first presented as a guest lecture on the invitation of
prof. Ludwig Nagl, 16 May 2006, Philosophy Dept., Universität Wien,
Austria. Current title: “Rewinding Malick’s The Thin Red Line
(1998) and Moving within the Neo-Heideggerian Image.”
25 February: The Chantal Akerman Phenomenon
Je Tu Il Elle (I You He She, 1974, French with English subtitles, 86 minutes, dir.
Chantal Akerman)
Rdgs: I. Margulies: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist
Everyday (Duke UP, 1996). PP. to be announced.
E: Roraback: “Forms of Creaturely Capital; or, Akerman’s Je Tu Il
Elle (I You He She, 1974)“.
4 March: Das Neue Kino: Fassbinder (New German Cinema)
Pre-film lecture and screening:
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten,
1971, German with English subtitles, 88 minutes, dir. Rainer Werner
Fassbinder)
Rdgs: D. Cook: A History, pp. 582–604.
E. Roraback: “Keep to Your Dreams: Fassbinder’s Movements of
Cinematic Intensity”.
C. B. Thomsen: “The Double Man”, “Bavaria and Hollywood” and
“Querelle” in Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative
Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (Faber and Faber, 1997) pp. 1–44,
101–10, and 302–11.
Will discuss: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, German with English subtitles, 940
minutes, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder), inter alia.
11 and 18 March: Soviet Cinema, Icon Art and the Medieval
Pre-film lecture and screening:
Andrei Rublev (1966, Russian with English subtitles, 205
minutes, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: D. Cook: A History, pp. 696–98.
E. Roraback: “Medieval Immobilizings and the Atheological Unconscious of
Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966)”.
CD extract: F. Couturier: “Andreï” (to Eduard Artemiev) 7:05 minutes from F.
Couturier, Nostalghia—Song for Tarkovsky (Munich: ECM, 2006).

25 March: Agnès Varda & the French New Wave

Pre-film lecture and screening:

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962, French with English subtitles, dir. Agnès Varda)

Rdgs: T. J. Kline, ed.: Agnès Varda: Interviews (Mississippi, 2014). Pages to be announced in class.

E. Roraback: “General Intellectual Circulation Within Vardes’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7)”.

M. Schmid: “The Visual Artist’s Gaze Agnès Varda’s Intermedial Layering” in Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts (Edinburgh UP, 2019): pp. 95–105.

1 and 8 April: Post French New Wave Cinema, Life, and Death

Pre-film lecture and screening:
Providence (1976, English, 102 minutes, dir. Alain Resnais)
Rdgs: L. Bersani and U. Dutoit: pp. 147–208, 221–25.
E. Roraback: “Immobilizing Forms of Movement Within the Folds of Time and
Memory: Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Muriel
(1963), and Providence (1976)”. Revised version of an essay
“Aesthetic Regions: or, The Double-Edges, Folds & Visions of Time &
of Memory of Resnais’s Muriel (1963) & Providence (1976)” first
presented at the 33rd annual conference of the International
Association of Philosophy and Literature, conference them: “Double
Edges: rhetorics, rhizomes, regions”, Brunel University, West
London, UK, 1–7 June 2009.
Will discuss: Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du lac, 1974, French with English
subtitles, dir. Robert Bresson).
The French New Wave and Cinematic Hallucinations
Pre-film lecture and screening:
Muriel or the Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 1963,
French with English subtitles,119 minutes, dir. Alain Resnais)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: L. Bersani and U. Dutoit: pp. 1–9, 147–208, 221–25.
D. Cook: A History, pp. 456–58.
G. Deleuze: pp. 116–25, 204–16 in Cinema 2.
E. Roraback: “Immobilizing Forms of Movement Within the Folds of
Time and Memory: Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955),
Muriel (1963), and Providence (1976)”. Revised version of an essay
“Aesthetic Regions: or, The Double-Edges, Folds and Visions of Time
and of Memory of Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) and Providence
(1976)” first presented at the 33rd annual conference of the
International Association of Philosophy and Literature, conference
theme: “Double Edges: rhetorics, rhizomes, regions”, Brunel
University, West London, UK, 1–7 June 2009. Current title:
“Immobilizing Forms of Movement Within the Folds of Time and
Memory: Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Muriel
(1963), and Providence (1976)”.

MID TERM ESSAY DUE 8 APRIL

15 and 22 April: After Italian Neorealism and Contemporary Eros
Pre-film lecture and screening:
L’Avventura (The Adventure or The Fling, 1959, English, 141
minutes, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: D. Cook: A History, pp. 535–39.
E. Roraback: “Collecting the Colors and the Spinozist Bodies of
Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The Adventure or The Fling, 1959)”.
Revised version of an essay first published as “The Colors and the
Spinozist Bodies of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The
Adventure or The Fling, 1959)” EREA 3.1 (printemps 2005): ix–xviii,
Univ. de Provence.
E. Roraback: “Moving Amidst the Spinozist Bodies of Antonioni’s
Blow-Up (1966)”.
S. Shaviro: The Cinematic Body, pp. 255–69
Will discuss: La Notte (The Night, 1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni), L’Eclisse
(The Eclipse, 1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni), Il deserto rosso
(Red Desert, 1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni), Blow-Up (1966,
dir. Michelangelo Antonioni), The Passenger (1975, dir.
Michelangelo Antonioni).

29 April and 6 May: American Film Noir II
Screening: Touch of Evil (1958, year 2000-released 111 minute version)
Rdgs/will discuss: Erik Roraback., “Exegetical Capital of Orson Welles’s Early- and
Mid-Style Film Noirs The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch of
Evil (1958)”.
Pre-film talk and screening:
The Lady from Shanghai (1948, 87 minutes, dir. Orson Welles).
Recommended (not required) viewing related to the Film Noir component of the
course that students may wish to find and to pursue on their own, e.g. FAMU
film library, etc.: classic American film noirs such as: Dark Passage; In a Lonely Place; Mildred Pierce, Murder, My Sweet; Out of the Past; The Big Heat; The Night of the Hunter; The Postman Always Rings Twice; The Big Sleep.
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs/will discuss: E. Roraback, “Exegetical Capital of Orson Welles’s Early- and
Mid-Style Film Noirs The Lady from
Shanghai (1948) and Mid-Style Touch of Evil (1958)” later version
of a paper first presented at the University of Szeged, Hungary, on
20 November 2003: “Deleuze, Orson Welles and the Cinematic
Baroque”.

13 May: The Global Sublime
Pre-film talk and screening:
Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report (The Comprehensive Version, 1955,
105 minutes, dir. Orson Welles)
Post-film lecture/discussion
Rdgs: G. Deleuze: pp. 98–155 in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
E. Roraback: Revised version of an essay first published as
“Circulating within Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report
for a Newly Armed Eye” in the conference proceedings from the 8th
Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies, 2005.
F. Truffaut: “Foreword” to André Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical
View, pp. 1–27.

FINAL ESSAY DUE 20 MAY

Last update: Roraback Erik Sherman, doc., D.Phil. (14.12.2024)