FIL360.2 : Challenging Hollywood: Gendering the Camera
Description:
With their increasing power in the domains of film writing, editing, directing, production and distribution, female filmmakers have prepared the ground for original voices and gazes to emerge in a traditionally male-dominated industry and art form. The course aims at testifying to those efforts and achievements, focusing on the reshaping of gender as portrayed on screen as well as on the originality of women directors’ authorship. A rich panorama of films, chosen among the most significant names on the international scene of the last twenty-five years, will challenge the students on issues of ethnic, cultural and sexual difference, spectatorship, and on filmic mechanisms pertaining to both mainstream and
auteur cinema. The course will explore the depiction of both man and woman on screen, as well as the formal strategies of women filmmakers, for a non-preconceived discussion of the differences between their cinema and that of their male counterparts. Students will try to determine if, when, and why we can speak of a feminine as opposed to dominant aesthetic, or maintain that the camera is “sexless”. The films are grouped according to three main categories: 1) mainstream or genre cinema, 2) feminist and lesbian cinema and 3) non-western cinema (in order to compare different discourses from other cultures). Three novels assigned to be read reflect the same principle. A course fee billed from Syracuse (Spring 2008 fee = $470) covers an overnight study tour to a film festival in Turin or Milan. Meets with LIT 400.2 and WSP 400.2.
Available Locations:
Italy
Semester(s) Offered:
Offered: Spring
Credits:
3
Department:
Film
