Week 5: Adaptation and the derivative work / Erica Sheen - Screenings Rear Window (Hitchcock 1954) A Man Escaped (Bresson 1956) Required reading: We will continue to discuss our reading on medium specificity and add to it: John Belton, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (CUP 2000) Stefan Sharrf, The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Southern Ill., 2001)_ Cornell Woolrich, ‘It Had to be Murder’ (1950) - pdf in VLE Robert Bresson, trans J. Griffin, Notes on the Cinematographer (Green Integer 1997). Joseph Cunneen, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film (Bloomsbury 2005) James Quandt, Robert Bresson (Ontario Cinematheque 1998) Andre Devigny, trans Peter Green, A Man Escaped (1958) - excerpts in VLE Rhonda Baker, Media Law: A User's Guide (Chapman and Hall 1995), 178 - pdf on VLE Rear Window and A Man Escaped share a surprisingly similar scenario: a man ‘captured’ in what is effectively the space of the frame, and exercising his imagination in resistance to his constraints. In every other respect they are polar contrasts: one exemplifies the ‘industrial’ Hollywood production system; the other is the work of a director who defies categorisation, even in post-war France. In this seminar we will consider i) contrasting approaches to adaptation as a process of creative, technical and technological transfer between two media; ii) the questions of intellectual property that derive from this. We will examine the documentation relating to the famous ‘Rear Window Case’, and contrast the modes of performance presented in these two films: the star system ; and Bresson’s concept of the ‘modèle’. Week 6: Reading Week: no classes or screenings/ submission of procedural essay Week 7: Surveillance and the Senses of Cinema/Michael McCluskey Screenings Blow Up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966)
The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1971) In this seminar we look at the links between cinema and surveillance and consider how technology extends our senses of sight and sound and shape our perception of the world around us. We start with ideas about phenomenology and film: the experience cinema has on the body beyond just its ‘visual pleasures’. Film can be seen as a multi-sensory experience, and we’ll discuss theoretical approaches for analysing cinema’s appeal to sensations beyond sight. We’ll then focus on film and the opportunities it creates for watching people, examining movements, listening in, and even impacting behaviour. The surveillance of citizens has been a longstanding part of state governance. We’ll discuss the recording of our activities as part of everyday security and the threats such forms of control bring to our civic freedoms. But we’ll also consider how prosthetic technologies enhance our abilities to engage with others and understand our own embodied experiences. Required reading: David Lyon, ‘Introduction’, Surveillance Society Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002). Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Lev Manovich ,’ Visual Technologies as Cognitive Prosthesis: A Short History of the Externalization of the Mind’, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future ed. by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). W. Russell Gray, ‘Tuning into The Conversation Twenty-five Years Later’, Journal of Popular Culture vol. 33. issue 2 (Fall 1999) 123-30. Suggested reading: Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision ed. by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). David Mellor, ‘“Fragments of an unknowable whole”: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966’, Visual Culture in Britain vol. 8, no. 2 (2007), 45-61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002). Frank P Tomasulo, ‘Phenomenology: Philosophy and Media Theory- An Introduction’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 12, no. 3, 1-8.