Course details

Name: ENFL - 251

Title: SPECIAL TOPICS: SURREALISM IN FILM

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2016

Credits: 3

Description:
Course description: Surrealist Cinema

The term “surreal” has come to mean simply “strange” or “bizarre,” but it originally referred to something much more extreme – the body of provocative, controversial works produced by an enormously influential cultural movement – surrealism – that flowered in Paris and Brussels in the years following WWI. Its members – young writers, poets, painters, scriptwriters and filmmakers like Artaud, Breton, Bunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Cocteau, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, and Miro – raged against the accepted social conventions of the time. In their view, the public’s unthinking acceptance of church and state-imposed conformity made possible bloody wars and crippling sexual repression. Impressed by Freud’s teachings about dreams and the unconscious, these revolutionaries began creating mysterious, erotic, irrational art designed to elicit powerful emotions and liberate imagination, shocking audiences out of their complacency and into fresh, super-real ways of seeing the world.

The course will begin with several works that surrealist filmmakers adored – anarchic American comedies (Sennett, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy), mysterious French serials (Fantomas), and frightening/erotic cartoons (Bimbo’s Initiation, Betty Boop, M.D.). It will include a few films by the Dadaists (Man Ray, Hans Richter, Rene Claire), the anti-art wartime precursors of the surrealists. It will focus on the classic surrealist movies, especially the fierce, groundbreaking Un Chien Andalou, L’Age D’Or and Land Without Bread. And it will feature works that followed the mid-1930s breakup of the movement, by its most enduring and prolific filmmaker, Luis Bunuel (Belle de Jour, Exterminating Angel). Finally, it will include several contemporary movies with significantly surrealist sensibilities: shorts by Conner, Deren, Jones, Polanski, the Quay Brothers, and Svankmajer, and features by Carax, Lynch, and Maddin, among others.

Requirements: weekly screenings and readings, active class participation, Canvas discussion forum, mid-term, final.






Schedule:

Graduation requirements:

  • Genre Study (Film)
  • ()
  • International Issues (3a)

Teaching Faculty: Cutler Janet (cutlerj)

Is course canceled: No