Welcome! If you don't care about movies, you should be out of this course. Meanwhile, all required movies and readings in this course will be available on canvas.
Movies are very subjective, but we are doing all this because we want to equip you with tools to write about movies. Movies help us learn about ourselves and each other. This course will survey movies decade by decade, across genres, in the hope that we get something new from old stuff. Well, what is cinema? Why do we love watching movies? Answering these questions is the agenda. The assignments reflect this: You will write a journalistic film review, make a brief videoessay, do a small make-a-meme project, and finally cap the course with a short academic paper. This is a course based on collaboration and doing things together.
Movies are leisure, but what would we do without them? Our collective task of writing better, takes on newer dimensions in the times of the current crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic came in the midst of wider societal emergencies like climate change, gender inequalities, economic disparities, and racial capitalism. Having said that, ,there are a million ways to think about movies and this course will attempt to scan that landscape. This course is meant to help you articulate in video/ sound/ letters/words/ sentences/paragraphs/no paragraphs - your role as a diligent university student, a caring human being to friends and family, and an emotionally generous member of the community.
Movies are expensive art, but what is a better way to pass time? There are three key routes to making our course a success. 1) All the movies are chosen with a specific aim to help you appreciate your individual relation and position to them as a 2023 watcher. As you will realize soon, your expression is obviously a product of your own thoughts, but also that of your social identities such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, mobility, religion, and citizenship. 2) Writing/ Podcasting/ Videoessaying is simultaneously an act of communication, persuasion, politics, and love. There are no preset rules in any of these tasks. But yes, there is an unspoken process underlying all of them by which we connect with other people: Establishing that connection needs an understanding of the process because an overthrow of rules is only possible after understanding them in the first place. 3) Lastly, as we begin our course: remember that your active participation as a student, and collaboration with your colleagues, and your peer reviewers, is the only way to make our collective endeavor - a success. The agenda remains: Why do we love watching all these movies?