A survey course on the global language of film and media. Screenings and readings will cover a range of national contexts, examining questions of national identity, national cinema, alternative cinema, Third cinema, experimental ethnography, diaspora, postcoloniality, globalization, and transnationality. The course will take advantage of the international and intercultural makeup of Los Angeles, as a means of exploring media and accessing practitioners who are working across national boundaries. May be repeated once for credit when offered with a different topic.
African Film and Media
Africa has one of the largest film industries in the world. This course surveys significant film and media traditions within Africa along with their aesthetic, political, and cultural contexts. We will explore African film and video across a broad array of traditions, mediums, and historical periods including the griot, Yoruba theatre, colonial visual culture, independence and liberation films, counter-ethnography, the Négritude movement, Third Cinema, post-independence Francophone Art films, sub-Saharan Black African cinema, FESPACO, Anglophone Nollywood and Ghana popular video, and African new media. The goal is to focus on distinctly African film and film scholarship by critically examining the various conflicting traditions and methodologies of cross-cultural African film studies. This course will involve seminar-style discussions, presentations, extensive screenings (in and outside of class), guest lectures by African filmmakers and scholars, and critical writing.
Gender, Race, and Nationality in Latin American and Latinx Film
This course centers on representations of gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality in Latinx and Latin American film. We will examine the economic, racial, and gendered inequalities that stem from histories of colonization and neocolonialism in Latin America and in the diasporic Latinx communities that have formed in the United States. Using a transnational lens, students will assess the limits and possibilities of film in documenting histories of oppression and social inequalities facing Latin Americans and Latinx communities in the U.S. We will turn to feminist film theory, critical film theory, cultural studies, and Latin American history and politics in order to facilitate our analysis and class discussions of these films. Cross-Listed as CTSJ 361.
Transpacific Social Justice
This course will explore a variety of contemporary film and multimedia productions, with a focus on social justice issues across the transpacific. Topics discussed may include, but are not limited to: race, gender, and sexuality in a networked world; war and its aftermaths; labor rights; and digital media advocacy. What are the implications of multimedia technologies for social justice and democracy, especially in marginalized communities across the Pacific? Our sessions will include readings by interdisciplinary, transnational, and feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Arjun Appadurai, Trinh T. Minh-ha, et al. These will be accompanied by discussions of films such as The Act of Killing/The Look of Silence and Plantungan (testimonies from Indonesian women political prisoners), and digital projects such as EngageMedia, Papuan Voices: Stories of West Papua, and the USC Visual History Archive.