This course will explore representative works by three directors, one Spanish, one Italian, and one French: Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, and Alain Resnais. In these films we can trace particular moments in the history of European thought, along with the themes of memory and desire, time and destruction, the spillage of dreams into waking life, and the haunting of the personal by the political. Above all, we can see in detail how film style and technique both represent and question all these subjects.

One 3-hour class and one film viewing weekly. Supplementary readings. Brief weekly written responses, and three critical research papers (5-6 pages each).