The course is a comprehensive overview into the main aspects of the vast field of film theory and criticism. The lecture is intended to be a theoretical guide into the field of film studies and provides students with key concepts of film and, in tandem, their theoretical background(s).
Kurzusok/Courses
Alant a jövő félévi kurzusok adatai – letölthető kurzusleírásokkal és olvasmánylistával!
Digitized Culture
The course aims to investigate the changes in culture and cultural theories brought about by the penetration of digitization in all spheres of life: the cinema, photography, communication, media, etc. The frames of interaction are now more and more dependent on the logic of software and database, and it certainly has impact on the way we theorize culture: are the “old” ways (semiotics, psychoanalysis, ideology criticism – to name but a few) still legitimate discursive grids when approaching issues such as identification processes on the internet?
Contemporary Visual Culture: From the Camera Obscura to the Digital Age
Virtually, modern life takes place onscreen. Human experience is now probably more visual and visualised than ever before from satellite picture to medical images of the interior of the human body. In the swirl of imagery (TV, Internet, computer, cinema), seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life.
Film Adaptation: Drama to Film (or Tennessee Williams Goes to Hollywood)
The objective of the seminar is to examine the adaptation of dramas to film in order to focus on the neglected topic of the “medial break” foregrounded (and veiled, at the same time) by the mechanisms of representation in these media. In the post-war period, Tennessee Williams became the most adapted of America’s playwrights, with his plays providing the source for some of Hollywood’s most critically acclaimed, most popular, and most financially successful films. The primary texts in this seminar include three Tennessee Williams dramas (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, and Suddenly Last Summer) and their film adaptations (by Richard Brooks, John Huston, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, respectively).
American Cinema / American Culture
The objective of the course is to provide an introduction for students to basic issues related to the phenomenon of US cinema. American Cinema / American Culture offers a look at American film history from the 1890s until today, but it does not explore this history in a purely chronological way. Rather, it proposes a cultural history, which focuses more on topics and issues than on what happened when.