Special Topics in Film and Digital Media: Political Cinema since Potemkin, Global Perspectives

This course centers upon a notion of political cinema that foregrounds film and video works distinguished at once by their ties to particular revolutionary and emancipatory causes, by the transnational scope of their politics of resistance, and by the abiding poignancy of their experiments in film form. Although ‘political cinema’ might be understood to mean many different things, we will be interested above all in filmmaking throughout the twentieth century that has sought not merely to reflect some preexisting social reality, but rather to directly intervene in that reality and, at the same time, to question received ideas about media production. Filmmakers and filmmaking collectives to be examined will include Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, Joris Ivens, Luis Buñuel, the Workers Film and Photo League, Claude Lanzmann, Grupo Cine Liberación, Santiago Álvarez, NEWSREEL, Sara Gómez, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Lizzie Borden, Kidlat Tahimik, Raoul Peck, and Chantal Akerman.