Topic

The Power of Cinema to Change the Mind of the Viewer

Instructions

Screening: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987)

Reading: Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Trashing the Academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter 1995, pp. 371-393. Link.

What makes a ‘good’ film? Why should we study certain films and not others? What can be gained from studying films that don’t conform to traditional concepts of ‘goodness’. What role does taste play in in our responses to film and television? How does Jeffrey Sconce’s approach to paracinema help us to rethink the ways we respond to issues of value?

Further reading: ‘The Cinema As Eye’ by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener.

Screening: Funny Games (Michael Hanneke, 1997)

Reading: Gabrielle Murray, ‘Representations of the body in pain and the cinema experience in torture-porn’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 50, spring 2008. Link.

How does our own morality and values systems shape the way we respond to cinema? Are there things that film and television can or indeed should not represent? Does engaging with screen violence make us complicit? Can a film and television show take representations of violence and the abject too far? What shapes our own individualised responses to screen violence?

Screening: Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

Reading: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, ‘Introduction’, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Introduction, McFarland 2011. Link.

How can the film and television industries best represent issues of sexual activity? What is the role of censorship in the representation of sex on screen? What is the distinction – if any – between representations of real sex on screen and the porn film? Are there limits to what film can present in terms of sexual activity/children/rape/incest.

Screening: Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Reading: Stuart Richards, 2016, “A New Queer Cinema Renaissance” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 1(2): 215-229. Link.

How has film and television sought to represent queer experience? In what ways does queer representation conform to or defy the heterosexual model which has traditionally been at the centre of sexual representation?

Screening: Master of None: Season One, Episode Two, “Parents” & Season One, Episode Four, “Indians on TV”

Reading: Manthia Diawara, ‘Black American Cinema: The New Realism’, Black American Cinema, Routledge, 1993. Link.

How have issues of race been represented through the history of screen media? In what ways have filmmakers attempted to challenge these histories? What is the role of the racial stereotype within screen media and how have these assumptions been challenged?

Screening: Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Reading: Elena del Río, ‘Body transformations in the films of Claire Denis: from ritual to play’, Studies in French Cinema, 3:3, pp. 185-197. Link.

How has film and television sought to intensify our engagement with the screen? What aural/visual strategies have been employed to enhance our senses and deepen our immersion in screen activity? How have different aesthetic approaches challenged the way we respond to screen products?

The task is a written response to one of the following questions:

Can meaningful advances in the representation of marginalised groups be made in mainstream cinema, or must such advances be achieved at the margins by independent producers? Compare a popular work of mainstream screen culture to an independent work, and present an argument as to whether the popular work can be interpreted as a progressive text or not (see Comolli and Narboni).
Traditional cinema theory imagines an idealised and often passive film spectator. How does the representation of taboos and confronting material (such as violence and sex) in cinema and television shift the way that we conceptualise of this spectator? In your response, consider a film or television episode that challenges the limits of what can be acceptably depicted in the moving image and how it has been analysed and discussed.
Jeffery Sconce argues that “Although paracinematic taste may have its roots in the world of ‘low-brow’ fan culture (fanzines, film conventions, memorabilia collections, and so on), the paracinematic sensibility has recently begun to infiltrate the avant garde, the academy, and even the mass culture on which paracinema’s ironic reading strategies originally preyed.” Has this assimilation compromised the power of ‘bad taste’ cinema as a political rejection of good taste? Examine one work of paracinema and evaluate its relationship to mainstream screen culture.
Comolli and Narboni argue that for cinema to be truly transgressive, it must attack the means of representing reality as well as what material is actually being depicted. Looking at a film or television episode that is formally experimental in some way (mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, narrative, and so on) evaluate how it seeks to shift the formal language of screen culture. Is this a political act?
Can cinema or television ever truly be subversive? If, as the quote widely attributed to Francois Truffaut contends, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” does this mean that screen culture in all contexts is incapable of meaningful critique? Evaluate a work of screen culture and its possibilities for subversion, or the power to change viewer’s minds.

Answer preview

Whether cinema or television can be truly subversive and change the viewpoints of the audience has been a topic of debate for centuries. Generally, those who hold that cinema can subvert the views of the viewer argue that with the use of the right approach and appropriate representation, movies can influence the way the audience perceives a certain theme in the society. The opponents, on the other hand, argue that cinema and television may not subvert the view of the viewer, since as the movie attempts to do so, it may strengthen or augment the existing viewpoint. That is, as the movie tries to subvert the perception of the viewer regarding violence or war, it may end up glorifying what it originally intended to critique.

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