Global Art Cinema 

Since the 1980s, global art cinema has represented a multifaceted challenge to the worldwide supremacy of Hollywood narratives, style, and ideology. This course will survey the most innovative responses to globalization, modernization, and contemporary geopolitical relations from film cultures other than Hollywood and its international imitators.

A central goal of this course is to emphasize the political implications of film style and map transnational, transgenerational, and transcultural alliances constituted around formal strategies aimed at subverting the aesthetic, cultural, and ideological premises of mainstream cinemas emulating Hollywood. The course provides students with a historically and theoretically informed overview of the emergence of alternative film cultures and the expansion of art cinemas worldwide.

While our primary focus will be contemporary world cinema, a special emphasis will also be put on the culturally effervescent and generative period following WWII. Throughout the Quarter, we will analyze and discuss a diverse array of films produced in a range of different countries, including – among others – Iran, Taiwan, Palestine, Mali, Hungary, and Japan.

The topics addressed in the course include the New Waves, slow cinema, film genres, and the responses of art cinemas to globalization processes. A strong commitment to the study of the course materials is expected from students. Although there are no prerequisites to enroll in this course, by the conclusion of the Quarter students are expected to master the analytical and conceptual tools learned throughout the course. The instructor provides access to a film analysis textbook, which should be used as a point of reference for writing about film.