Mass Culture and Modern Media: Fantasylands: Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Spatial Imagination

This seminar examines cinema's relationship to urbanism, modern life, and amusement culture--especially in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This exploration is meant to facilitate a broader understanding of cinema by situating the medium in relation to the new forms of spatiality, temporality, and mobility that were consonant with "modernity." In particular, we will focus on commercial entertainments and spaces that produced stunning artificial environments, exotic virtual voyages, and a thrilling sense of bodily disorientation, while contributing to the formation of specific publics. By considering cinema's historical relation to these entertainments and locales, we can better understand cinema's connections to industrial capitalism, urbanization, consumer culture, aesthetic modernism, colonialism, and other forms of distance-spanning media. Along the way, we will encounter a variety of modern spaces, places, and forms of transit. These include: the railway journey, the amusement park, the zoo, the world's fair, the circular panorama, the circus, and the movieland. In the process, students will be introduced to relevant theories of space and place, urbanism, modern media, consumerism, and mass culture. For graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. REQUIRED SCREENINGS: Mondays @ 4 pm

Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA CPSC

Mass Culture and Modern Media: Fantasylands: Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Spatial Imagination

FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 5429

Section A

Section 01