English Literature 0530 -- B Film Analysis

This course will introduce you to the critical analysis of film as a cultural product, a medium of entertainment, a commercial enterprise, and a form of communication. You will sharpen your visual skills as you learn to "read" the details of cinematic "language" such as the arrangement of shots (editing), the composition or framing of a shot (cinematography), the overall look of a film (mise-en-scene), and the entire sound environment of a film. We will not only identify such cinematic details, but will also consider how they contribute to the overall meaning of a film and how they have been used in a variety of film forms, including narrative cinema, documentary, and experimental film.

Throughout the semester, we will also explore several concepts that have been important to the study of film, such as realism, genre, authorship, and ideology. Our goal will be to pay close attention to the specific cinematic choices made by individual films, while placing each film in the context of cinema history as well as a wider social and historical context.

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English Literature 0540 -- World Film History

This course will introduce you to the major films and movements of international cinema from 1898 to the present. We will focus on the impact of technological and social changes on cinema, while placing such film-specific events as the invention of cinema, the coming of sound, or the use of color in broader historical and cultural contexts. As we encounter such film styles and national cinemas as Soviet Montage, Surrealism, German Expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism, or Third Cinema, we will consider the ways in which film has responded to or shaped important events of the twentieth century, such as the Russian revolution, World War II, and various decolonization movements. While your goal in this course is to understand and learn about films in their historical context, you will also sharpen your visual and analytical skills as we take a detailed look each week at the specific formal, narrative, and rhetorical choices made by individual films and filmmakers.

One of the assumptions of this course is that you are already familiar with Hollywood cinema and its conventions. Since 14 weeks can hardly do justice to the history of more than a century of cinema, I have chosen to exclude Hollywood films from the syllabus. Yet Hollywood will be the absent presence throughout this semester as we learn about the global hegemony of Hollywood products and the response of various film movements to its conventions. At the same time, our discussion this semester will also challenge the assumption that Hollywood cinema is the only mainstream commercial cinematic form by beginning and ending with two other globally powerful mainstream film traditions: Hong Kong cinema and Indian cinema.

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English Literature 1390 -- Contemporary Film

This course surveys international film from 1950 to the present and examines the stylistic and cultural interrelationships among various international film movements. Along the way, we will address questions and issues that have been central to many of these film schools; for instance: Is entertainment the main function of cinema? What is filmic realism? How can cinema be a social document? Can film intervene as an agent of revolution? How do films participate in, or break away from, mainstream modes of representing race, gender, and colonialism?

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English Literature 1410 -- Indian Cinema

This course will give students an overview of Indian cinema, the world's largest film industry, in its historical, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Students will learn how to analyze Indian films from the 1920s to the present in terms of their formal techniques, narrative conventions, and viewing contexts, as well as in terms of broader historical contexts, such as colonialism and the Independence movement. The issues addressed in this course include: art vs. commercial cinema; Hollywoods influence; the culture of stardom in India; colonialism and national identity; the representation of history; questions of gender; and the Indian diaspora. Weekly film screenings will offer students a sampling of a representative range of film-making traditions, such as studio-era films; Bombay films, art films, the middle cinema, documentary films, regional cinema, and diaspora films.

The course will be divided into five units covering the following areas: historical background, Bombay cinema, the South Asian diaspora; nationalism and gender; and nationalism and historical representation. Classes will be structured around a combination of lecture and discussion. Prior to each weeks screening, students will receive a set of specific questions designed to guide their reading. They will be asked to take screening notes, which will form the basis of a guided class discussion.

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English Literature 1485 -- Film and Politics

How do films construct the past? By what visual and cinematic means is the process of memory conveyed? How does the time frame in which a film is viewed affect the way its representation of the past is understood? Film and Politics is a writing-intensive course whose topic this semester is the relation between film and history. While the course will be structured around films that narrate historical events or otherwise engage the past, our interest will not be to evaluate the accuracy of a film's historical representation. Rather, we will consider the uses to which history, both "real" and " invented," has been put in various mainstream and alternative cinematic traditions around the world. Issues to be considered will include: memory and national identity, "truth" and representation, "documentary" and " fiction," personal and collective pasts, and censorship.

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English Literature 1683 -- Documentary Film

In the history of cinema, the documentary film has mostly been regarded as a category on its own, with an implicit opposition between nonfiction and fiction films. In this course, we will examine the history of such a division, starting with early silent actualities, but we will also reconsider such an opposition between fiction and "document." As we encounter the ideas of different theorists of the documentary form, some of the issues we will explore are: what cinematic styles have come to be associated with documentaries because of their "reality effect"? How exactly does a filmmaker mediate between the viewer and the subject of the film? What is the "voice" of documentary? Is it possible to film an event objectively? How do documentaries persuade viewers? How does our understanding of a specific documentary film change according to where and when we view it? What narrative forms do we find in documentary films?

In the first part of the course, which will be structured historically and chronologically, you will watch some landmark documentaries and learn about significant film movements and directors and the technological and cinematic innovations associated with them. In the second part of the course, we will study different styles and forms of international documentary filmmaking, considering the cultural and historical context of each film, its goals, its impact, and its cinematic choices.

English Literature 2390 -- Anglophone South Asian Novels

This course investigates selected novels (along with some novellas and short stories) from South Asia, primarily India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, from the 1930s to the present. We will take up historical movements such as the entrance of female novelists into English and the “new” Pakistani novel. We will devote attention to themes such as Independence, Partition, the Indian Emergency, the New Woman, the Domestic Sphere, the ethnically Divided Nation, and the Dalit novel. Formal differences will get some attention, from generic evolution to regional differences in style. For example we’ll give thought to Mulk Raj Anand’s relation to the Bloomsbury modernists in the 1930s against R.K Narayan’s form of regional realism in the 40s and 50s. We will take stock of the formal temblors set off by Midnight’s Children and its progeny and also survey what that novel’s explosive arrival occluded in then-current writing from the subcontinent. This is not a course in postcolonial theory as such. Most of our attention will be given to novels, some of them quite long. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with historical and critical materials in dialogue with the instructor in preparing seminar papers, and they should consider reading some novels over the summer. (Everyone should have read Midnight’s Children; we will also read A Fine Balance, When Memory Dies, and, hopefully, Sacred Games.) This course is held in conjunction with a conference on The Anglophone Asian Novel at Pitt; attendance at the conference constitutes part of our course. Likely authors: Mulk Raj Anand, Desani, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Salman Rushdie, A. Sivanandan, Rohinton Mistry, V. Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Desphande, Vikram Chandra.

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