ENGL 355-02: Special Topics Graduate Seminar, Fall 2006
Classical Hollywood Narrative and Its Discontents

Tues 12:30-3:00p, Buttrick 308
(plus mandatory screenings Sun 4:00-6:00p AND Mon 6:00-8:30p, Buttrick 103, beginning September 10)

Paul Young
Benson 419    paul.d.young@vanderbilt.edu        22347
Office Hours: W 2-3:30p, Th 9:30-11a, and by appointment

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
"Classical Hollywood Cinema": Since Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson's monumental study of the development of Hollywood storytelling and filmmaking practices, the term has become synonymous in Film Studies with all that is both pleasurable and rote about mass-market movies: psychologically-motivated characters, goal-driven plots, causal development, unified endings, and narrative economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this list of characteristics also describes many things that avant-garde, experimental, and other "non-commercial" film genres are not. But are classical film and other forms really so distinct? How much do classical qualities depend upon characteristics of film as a medium (its "realist" capturing of space and time, its editability, its framing properties), and how much upon cultural, economic, and ideological determinants?

This course will track that conceptual monolith, "classical cinema," from its emergence and rise to dominance (1908-1920) through the myriad challenges to its dominance after 1920, in order to discover the utility of this film-historical concept as well as to consider its descriptive and theoretical limitations. Beginning with literary theories of "classical" realist narration (Barthes, Jakobson, Lukács, and others), we will read deeply in classical narrative cinema theory/history and investigate, through both film screenings and the airing of counter-theories, the forces that challenge classical cinema's integrity and stability from without (avant-garde, experimental, and "art" film, art-house cinema, alternative screening practices) and from within (genres, spectacle, the star system, self-reflexivity). The screening schedule consists of a liberal mix of classical Hollywood films (both past and present), avant-garde works, postwar European films, and independently produced narrative films. Participants are encouraged to watch as many films from any and all periods of American film history on their own over the course of the semester as can be safely borne.


TEXTBOOKS AND PHOTOCOPIES—WEEKLY SCREENINGS—PARTICIPATION:
Please read the assigned books, chapters, and handouts listed for each meeting in advance of the date listed. I can’t stress the following strongly enough: You need to prepare to participate actively in discussion each week by posing questions, making reasoned claims based on your best readings of texts and films, going out on a limb once in a while, and being thoroughly excellent to each other by listening, giving others a chance to speak, responding to and asking questions of others that keep discussion moving productively, and refraining from grandstanding as well as from playing the wallflower!

You will also need to see the films screened Sundays and Mondays and take notes on them to prepare for the Tuesday meetings. Prior to the Sunday screening and after the Monday screening each week, the DVDs and videotapes will be returned to Reserve at the Microform & Media Center/Gov’t Documents desk in Central (Heard) library, 4th floor (entry level from main campus), where you may watch the videos at one of the Center’s carrels.

PLEASE NOTE that at the beginning and end of the semester the same film is shown at each screening, but once Group Presentations begin, two different films will be shown, one on Sunday and one on Monday. You are responsible for seeing both before the following Tuesday meeting, taking notes, and preparing to discuss them. In those cases, the group presenting that week will be responsible for contextualizing and leading discussion about the Sunday film as it relates to that week’s readings, but everyone will have to see both films in order for the groups to do their jobs properly, and for each of you to become experts in filmic narration strategies and variant aesthetics and forms of narration among distinct genres, eras, national cinemas, directors, etc.

TEXTBOOK LIST:
The following textbooks are (or will be) available at the Vandy Bookstore and have also been placed on Reserve (basement of Central Library). Please check the online Reserves list for this course for other relevant, supplementary texts.

1. [C] = photocopies. I will leave these in the Xerox room, Benson 3rd floor, for you to copy each week. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THE ORIGINAL. Copy it in the copy room and return promptly, please!
2.  Altman, Film/Genre
   
3.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
4. Barthes, Image-Music-Text
5. Barthes, S/Z
6. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960
7. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film
8. Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars
9. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film
10. Moore, Savage Theory
11. Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals (recommended; we will read chaps. 2-3)

COURSE CALENDAR:

T 29 August
Introduction: Narrative, Narration, and Fiction/Film
In-class focus texts: L’arrivée d’un train (Louis Lumière, France 1896) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, US 1940, opening segment)
Please get a head start by reading S/Z for the FIRST time by today.

NO SCREENING THIS WEEK.
RECOMMENDED CLASSICAL FILMS (try to watch a couple on your own at Central Library or as rentals—for use in getting a handle on the balance between structural sameness and plot/topical diversity that has made classical Hollywood narrative such a supple and resilient system):
Stagecoach, The Searchers, Red River, The Naked Spur, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night, Casablanca, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, All That Heaven Allows, Jezebel, Mrs. Skeffington, The Little Foxes, Top Hat, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Cat People, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Public Enemy, Scarface (1932)

T 5 September
Balzac, Sarrasine (in S/Z)
Barthes, S/Z
Tomashevsky, “Thematics” [C]

++++
SCREENING Sun 9/10 and Mon 9/11:
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, US 1941) [DVD 399]

T 12 September
2-PAGE, 2x-SPACED ANALYSIS OF FLAUBERT or CONAN DOYLE SEGMENT DUE (2pp or “hits” on all five of Barthes’s codes, whichever comes last)
Flaubert, “Un coeur simple” [C]
Barthes, “The Reality Effect” [C]
Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” [C]
Todorov, “The Detective Novel” [C]

++++
SCREENING Sun 9/17 and Mon 9/18:
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, US 1948) [DVD 1161/Videotape 2157]

T 19 September
BRING WORKING DRAFT OF LADY FROM SHANGHAI PLOT SEGMENTATION FOR EXCHANGE
Bordwell, chaps. 1-6
Branigan chaps. 1-2
Jakobson, “The Dominant” and “On Realism in Art” [C]
Gunning chap. 1

++++
SCREENING Sun 9/24 and Mon 9/25:
Griffith Biograph Shorts (take note of each film’s title and date) [DVD 371, disc 1]

T 26 September
DISCUSS EXCHANGED LADY FROM SHANGHAI SEGMENTATIONS
Todorov, “The Grammar of Narrative” [C]
Gunning, chaps. 2, 3
Branigan, chap. 3
Bordwell et al., chaps 14-17
[RECOMMENDED: Branigan chap. 4]

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 10/1:     Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, US 1940) [DVD 327]
Mon 10/2:     Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, US 1948) [Personal VHS copy]

T 3 October
GROUP PRESENTATION 1
Barthes, “The Photographic Message” in Image-Music-Text
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [C]
Branigan, chapters 5-6
[RECOMMENDED: Gledhill essay in Gaines collection]

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 10/8:     The Lady from Shanghai [DVD 1161/Videotape 2157]
Mon 10/9:     Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, US 1956) [DVD 1167]

T 10 October
GROUP PRESENTATION 2
Bordwell et al., chaps. 7 and 18
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
Altman essay, in Gaines
Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury” [C]
[RECOMMENDED: Altman, Film/Genre chap. 1]

FINAL, FOOTNOTED SEGMENTATIONS OF LADY FROM SHANGHAI DUE BY FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13 (earlier is perfectly acceptable!)

++++
T 17 OCTOBER—Midterm: No Class

++++
SCREENINGS   
Sun 10/22:     King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, US 1933) [DVD 1062, disc 1]
Mon 10/23:     Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, US 1932) [DVD 1158]

T 24 October
GROUP PRESENTATION 3
Bordwell et al., chaps. 21-23
Altman, Film/Genre chaps. TBA
Young, chaps. 2-3

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 10/29:     Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard 1962) [DVD 2]
Mon 10/30:     Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, US 1948) [DVD 331]

T 31 October
GROUP PRESENTATION 4
Brecht, “The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater” [C]
Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” in Image-Music-Text
Nichols essay, in Gaines
D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope” [C]

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 11/5:     Ivan the Terrible, Part I (S. M. Eisenstein, USSR 1944) [DVD 458, d. 1]
Mon 11/6:     The Disorderly Orderly (Frank Tashlin, US 1964) [DVD 532]

T 7 November
GROUP PRESENTATION 5
Barthes, “The Third Meaning” in Image-Music-Text
Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” [C]
Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” [C]
Bordwell/Dudley Andrew debate, from the journal Iris (1989) [C]

FRIDAY 11/10, 4:00p: 2-3pp SEMINAR PAPER PROSPECTUS DUE

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 11/12:     Experimental films: Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel 1928) [DVD 764]
Kino Avant-Garde (disc 1, beginning with The Life and Death of 9413 a Hollywood Extra) [DVD 1160, disc 1]
Mon 11/13:     Sans soleil (Chris Marker, France 1982) [Videotape 3010]

T 14 November
Branigan, chap. 7
Benjamin, “The Artwork in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” [C]
Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” [C]

++++
T 21 NOVEMBER—No Class

++++
SCREENINGS
Sun 11/26:     That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, France 1977) [DVD 1166]
Mon 11/27:     Go (Doug Liman, US 1999) [DVD 1164]

T 28 November
Bordwell et al., chaps. 30-31
Thompson, from Storytelling in the New Hollywood [C]
Moore, Introduction and chaps. 1-3

++++
SCREENING Sun 12/3 and Mon 12/4:
L’Argent (Robert Bresson, France 1983) [DVD 1163]

T 5 December
Moore chaps. 4-8

++++
NO SCREENING THIS WEEK

++++
T 12 December: Final Paper Presentations TBA

15-25pp Research Papers due at the end of Finals Week, TBA