Narrative in Cinema

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world” – Jean-Luc Godard

“I’d rather entertain and hope that people learn, than teach and hope that people are entertained” – Walt Disney

Course Description:

This course is an introduction to a critical approach to film as an art and a form of media. We will build upon our popular understandings of the form through discovery of the codes, conventions, and various genres that help to define a language of film. Film has a strong impact on our understanding and engagement with society and culture; understanding how this medium makes meaning offers us more of an opportunity to understand our own positionality within that society and culture. This course involves a critical understanding of film as form and object, but it does not include instruction in the creation of film narrative or documentary.

Course Evaluation:

  • Discussion                                                      20%          
  • Film Review                                                   15%              
  • Scene Analysis                                               15%              
  • Video Essay                                                   15%                
  • Final Essay                                                    35%             

Weekly Schedule & Readings:

WEEK 1 – Introduction: What is Film?

Screening: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog, 90mins, 2010)

Supplemental:

  • Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave [1973],” in On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, pp. 1-24.

WEEK 2 – Setting the Scene

Screening: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 99mins, 2014)

WEEK 3 – Editing the Shots

  • Kraut, Anthea. “Female Surrogate Labor and White Corporeal Debt in Singin’ in the Rain,” in Camera Obscura, vol. 36, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1-31. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1215/02705346-9052774   
  • Arsenjuk, Luka. “Introduction: A Dialectic of Division,” in Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis by Luka Arsenjuk, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 1-18 only.  

Screening: Singin’ in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 103mins, 1952)

Supplemental:

  • Bordwell, David. “The Introduction of Sound,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style& Mode of Production to 1960, edited by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, 2nd ed., Routledge, 1988, pp. 536-47.  

WEEK 4 – Auteur & Style

Screening: Ed Wood (Burton, 127mins, 1994)

Supplemental:

WEEK 5 – The Gaze

  • Truscello, Michael and Renae Watchman. “Blood Quantum and Fourth Cinema: Post- and Paracolonial Zombies,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 40, no. 4, 2023, pp. 462-83, (published online: 22 January 2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2026273
  • Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18. 

Screening: Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 96mins, 2019)

Supplemental:

  • Smith, Terry. “Visual Regimes of Colonization: Aboriginal Seeing and European Vision in Australia,” in The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 1998, pp. 483-494.
  • Halberstam, Judith. “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don’t Cry,” in Screen, vol. 42, no. 3, 2001, pp. 294-98.

WEEK 6 – Documentary Narrative

Screening: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 67mins, 1929)

Supplemental:

  • “1929: Man With A Movie Camera – What makes something ‘Cinema’?” (One Hundred Years of Cinema, YouTube, 5mins 31sec, 2017)

WEEK 7 – Hero Narrative

Screening: Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 121mins, 2014)

Supplemental:

WEEK 8 – Transmedia Storytelling

  • Scott, Suzanne. “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, Routledge, 2012, pp. 43-52
  •  Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” from Pop Junctions: Reflections on Enterntainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More, 21 March 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
  • Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 202,” from Pop Junctions: Reflections on Enterntainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Literacy, Fandom and More, 31 July 2011,  http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html

Screening: The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 136mins, 1999)

WEEK 9 – Global Film

  • Jian, Pu. “Modern Chinese Cinema: Box Office Boom in Full Swing,” in Chinese Literature Today, translated by Yang Yichen and Lennet Daigle, vol. 3, no. 1 & 2, 2013, pp. 76-81.    
  • Teo, Stephen. “The Chinese Film Market and the Wolf Warrior 2 Phenomenon,” in Screen, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 322-331.  

Screening: Wolf Warrior [Zhan lang] (Wu, 90mins, 2015)

WEEK 10 – National Cinema: Canada

  • Elder, R. Bruce. “Introduction,” and “Part One Introduction,” in Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989, pp. 1-15.    
  •  Whitehead, Jessica Leonora. “Hollywood Goes North: The Making of a ‘Canadian’ War Epic, Captains of the Clouds,” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 23-47. https://doi.org/10.3138/CJFS.27.2.2018-0001

Screening: Dawn, Her Dad and the Tractor (Thompson, 90mins, 2021)

Supplemental:

WEEK 11 – Animation

  • Krämer, Peter. “Toy Story, Pixar and Contemporary Hollywood,” in Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature, edited by Susan Smith, Noel Brown, and Sam Summers, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 7-20. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501324949&st=toy+story   
  • Inge, M. Thomas. “Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Art, Adaptation, and Ideology,” in Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol.  32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 132-42.

Screening:   Turning Red (Shi, 100mins, 2022)

WEEK 12 – Film as Spectacle

  •  Gunning, Tom. “’Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in Velvet Light Trap, vol. 32, 1993, pp. 3-12.
  •  Marsh, Calum. “Lights, Camera, TikTok: How Young People are using the App to Engage with, and Critique, the Movies,” in The New York Times, 1 November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/movies/tiktok-filmmaking.html

Screening: Be Kind Rewind (Gondry, 102mins, 2008)