Department of English

This course concerns itself with cinema in its entirety. We focus on two signal works that attempt to synthesize the cinema into a single, century-long, media event: Gilles Deleuze's books Cinema 1 & 2 and Jean-Luc Godard's multi-episode cinematic work Histoire(s) du cinéma. For Deleuze cinema is both an autonomous epistemological phenomenon (films as pure thought) and an autonomous ontological phenomenon (films as pure being). By contrast Godard focuses on cinema's ability or inability to represent history, both the history of Europe during the twentieth century, frequently caught in the clutches of war, but also the history of movie-making itself. Additional readings and screenings will be drawn from similarly encyclopedic assessments of the last hundred years, including Slavoj Žižek's film The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, and Alain Badiou's book The Century.