History and Film (HI978) Course Director: J. Smyth, Humanities Building, H3.28 Email: [email protected] Core Module Time and place: Term 1, Tuesdays 10-12 in S1.41 unless otherwise specified Module Aims This module introduces students to the histories, discourses, and controversies surrounding cinema’s capacity to construct or even “write” history. It also explores select issues in the wider historiography of film and media. Students will probe issues in authorship, genre, narration, censorship, and reception, exploring traditions and innovations in historical filmmaking from Hollywood, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Intended Learning Outcomes Students will analyze different national and transnational approaches to constructing the past from the early sound era to the present. Each seminar will discuss a different key film, its production history and its wider historical contexts and controversies.

Week 1: Film, History, and Historiography Seminar tutor: Dr. J. E. Smyth Contact: [email protected] Key films: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) Citizen Kane (1941) Read: Robert Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words" (1988); Hayden White, "Historiography and Historiophoty" (1988) And in the library, skim Marc Ferro, Film History (1988); Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (2006); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (1975); David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (1979) On Young Mr. Lincoln (1939): Key: Cahiers du cinéma, “Collective Text on John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln” (1970) And on Citizen Kane, suggested reading: Ronald Gottesman, ed., Focus on "Citizen Kane" (1996); Robert Carringer, "Rosebud: Dead or Alive" (1976); Robert Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane (1984); J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema (2006), ch 11; Laura Mulvey,  

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Citizen Kane (1992) Seminar Questions: What is history? What is historiography? What are the properties of a historical film? Why do historians and filmmakers seldom agree on the central concepts of history? What is meant by a “filmic writing of history” and is it possible? Wednesday screening: The Shootist (1976) 1-3 SO.17 Week 2: Authorship and Genre Seminar tutor: Dr. J. E. Smyth Contact: [email protected] Films (see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962, and choose two others from the following list): Stagecoach (1939), Duel in the Sun (1946), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), The Searchers (1956), The Big Country (1958), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Heaven’s Gate (1980), Unforgiven (1992), Gran Torino (2008) Read: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936); Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, (1991): 101-119; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964); Rick Altman, "A Semantic and Syntactic Approach to Film Genre" (1984) [available on JStor] and Film/Genre (1999); Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions (1968) And specifically on the Western, look at Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: the Western Films (1985); Robert Warshow, “The Westerner,” in The Immediate Experience; John Cawelti, Six-Guns and Society (1971); Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds., The Western Reader (1999); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (1992); Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., John Ford Made Westerns (2002) Questions: Define genre and myth and discuss how the concepts may be connected. What are the foundations of the Western film genre? What is the Western’s attitude toward history and the frontier (see Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, 1893)? Who was John Ford? Why is he so important to the genre? Is he a historian? Why/not? How has Clint Eastwood impacted the construction of Western history? Why are directors considered the ultimate “authors” of films? Can you think of films and periods in film history when other types of filmmakers exerted authorial status? What role do screenwriters have in most histories of Hollywood cinema? Wednesday screening: Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), 1-3 SO.17

 

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Week 3: Women’s Screen History: Content and Form Seminar tutor: Dr. J. E. Smyth Films: Julia (1977) Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) Historia Oficial (1985) A Star is Born (1937) Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) The Piano (1993) Meek’s Cutoff (2010) Hannah Arendt (2012) Reading: All read: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1988) Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt (2002) Barbara McLean, Oral History with Tom Stempel (1971) [Handout, week 2] Suggested additional sources: Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1998) Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? (2010) Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977) Sherna Berger Gluck, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (1991) Amelie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (2007) Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Profession in America (2003) Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (1995) Susan E. Linville, Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women's Auto/biographical Film in Postwar Germany (1998) Jessica Stites Mor, Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left Since 1968 (2012); Geetha Ramanathan, Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (2006) Ana Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (2012) Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvelescu, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film (2013) Betty Smith, The Gender of History (1998) Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance (1995) Hayden White, Metahistory (1973) Questions: What is the history of women’s involvement in the film industry? Is historiography gendered? Is women’s historiography possible? If so, how would it differ in its aims and form from traditional historiography? How have filmmakers represented women’s history on screen? Do women’s biopics differ fundamentally from men’s?

 

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Screening: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), 1-3, SO.17 Week 4: Archive and Interpretation Seminar tutor: Dr. J. E. Smyth All students will read Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler (2013) and Ben Urwand, The Collaboration (2013). Consider also: Matthew Bernstein, ed., Controlling Hollywood (1999) Michael Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers (1999) Steven Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism (2001) Clayton Koppes and Greg Black, Hollywood Goes to War (1990) Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono (2001) Alf Lüdkte and Sebastian Jobs, eds., Unsettling History (2010) John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies (2012) Questions: What are the principle archives for the study of motion picture history? What are the different materials that can be studied, and why are they useful? Compare Doherty and Urwand’s sources and how they are used. How did film censorship function in the 1930s and 1940s? How were international markets affected by different kinds of censorship? Did the Hollywood studios “collaborate” with the Nazis? Which films were considered “subversive” by US government officials during the 1930s and 1940s? What was the Dies Committee and what was its impact on Hollywood? *Tuesday History & Film Seminar, 5pm, SO.20: Dr Jenny Barrett, Edge Hill University: “The Man Who Knows War: American Civil War Westerns and Masculinity at the Frontier” Wednesday screening: The Murderers are Among Us (1944), 1-3pm SO.17 Week 5: Re-viewing German history from East and West: the split screen Seminar tutor: Dr. Sean Allan Contact: [email protected] Films: The Murderers are Among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1944) I was Nineteen (Konrad Wolf, 1968) The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979) Readings: (a) Introductory material: What is a national cinema?

 

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Meurer, Hans-Joachim, Cinema and National Identity in a Divided Germany 19791989. The Split Screen, Lampeter: Mellen, 2000, pp. 15-42. Hayward, Susan, ‘Framing National Cinema, in Cinema & Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 88-102. (b) The Murderers are Among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) Byg, Barton, ‘Nazism as femme fatale: recuperations of cinematic masculinity in postwar Berlin,’ in: Gender and Germanness. Cultural Productions of Nation, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, Oxford: Berghahn, 1998, pp. 176-88. Shandley, Robert R. ‘Coming home through rubble canyons: The murderers are among us and generic convention’, in: Rubble Films. German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich, ed. Robert R. Shandley, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 25-46. (c) I was Nineteen (Konrad Wolf, 1968) Silberman, Marc, German Cinema. Texts in Context, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995, pp. 143-161(= The Authenticity of Autobiography. Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen). Elsaesser, Thomas, and Wedel, Michael. "Defining DEFA's historical imaginary: the films of Konrad Wolf." New German Critique, 82 (2001), 3-25. (d): The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979) Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity Subject, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996, pp. 97-128 ( = ‘The BRD Trilogy, or History, The Love Story’). Kaes, Anton, From Hitler to Heimat. The Return of History as Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), pp. 73-104 ( = The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun) Questions to consider: How can we conceptualise post-war cinema in Germany in terms of national cinemas? Are there two German national cinemas’? What is the relationship of East German film production to West German film production? What are the implications of this for German historiography.

 

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Each of the three films deploys a quite different set of stylistic conventions: compare and contrast the contribution of these stylistic conventions to the presentation of German history in the three films. Compare and contrast the role of gender/masculinity in the historical narratives the films set up. What is affect? How is it mobilised in the three films? Issues to reflect on in the individual films: The Murderers are Among Us

• How is the question of (German) victimhood treated in the film? • To what extent is the treatment of the German past dealt with in terms that

are 'individual' rather than 'social'? • What stylistic/narrative/filmic conventions from the pre-war era does Staudte’s film draw on? I was Nineteen • • • • •

How does the film mobilise concepts of identity? What is the film’s take on German-Soviet relations? What concepts of ‘victimhood’ does the film work with? What positions of ‘resistance’ does the film construct/work with? What kind of explanations for fascism does the film promote?

The Marriage of Maria Braun • • • •

Consider the function of melodrama in Fassbinder’s presentation of German history Analyse the presentation of race in the film What is the film’s take on German-American relations? How does Fassbinder’s exploration of masculinity in the Marriage of Maria Braun contrast with that in Staudte’s The Murderers are Among Us?

Additional background reading: Seán Allan and John Sandford, DEFA: East German cinema, 1946-1992 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 1-21 ( = DEFA. An historical overview) & pp. 22-41 ( = DEFA and the traditions of East German Cinema) Berghahn, Daniela, Hollywood behind the Wall. The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: MUP, 2005), Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

 

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Additional viewing: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is the first part of Fassbinder’s so-called BRDtrilogy about post-war German history. You may find it helpful to view the other two parts (each of which is a self-contained film in its own right). • •

Lola (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981) Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

NB: All the films are available for viewing in the Transnational Resources Centre in the Humanities Building.

Week 6: Reading Week—no seminars Week 7: Cinema and May ’68 in France Module tutor: Dr. Douglas Morrey Contact: [email protected] Required viewing: La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2004) Après Mai (aka Something in the Air; Olivier Assayas, 2012) Required reading: Jean-Luc Godard, ‘A Struggle on Two Fronts’, in Godard on Godard (ed. by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, trans. by Tom Milne), London: Secker & Warburg, 1972. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Red of La Chinoise: Godard’s Politics’, in Film Fables, trans. by Emiliano Battista, Oxford: Berg, 2006. Michael Leonard, ‘Cinema/History: Philippe Garrel, Bernardo Bertolucci and May 1968’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 1 (2011), http://www.alphavillejournal.com/. Kent Jones, ‘Lost Companions and Fleeing Ghosts’, in Olivier Assayas, Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum/SYNEMA-Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2012. Suggested further viewing: Milou en mai (Louis Malle, 1990) Les Amants réguliers (Philippe Garrel, 2005) Nés en 68 (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2008) Suggested further reading: Assayas, Olivier, A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.  

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Brody, Richard, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. MacCabe, Colin, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Williams, James S., ‘“C’est le petit livre rouge/Qui fait que tout enfin bouge”: The case for revolutionary agency and terrorism in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise’, Journal of European Studies 40: 3 (2010), pp. 206-18. Wednesday screening: The Wedding Banquet (1993), SO.17 * Week 8: ‘Queering China’ 3-5 pm, Tuesday: Room H0.16 Seminar tutor: Dr. Howard Chiang Contact: [email protected] Films: Stanley Kwan, Lan Yu (2001) Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet (1993) David Cronenberg, M. Butterfly (1993) Optional: Chen Kaige, Farewell, My Concubine (1993) Seminar Questions 1. What are the limitations of the concept of ‘Chinese-language films’? 2. Is the notion of ‘the Sinophone’ as proposed by Shu-mei Shih a good substitute? 3. What are the analytical limitations of the concept of the Sinophone? 4. Why does history matter to our reading of Lan Yu (2001) and M. Butterfly (1993)? 5. Are gender and sexuality useful categories of analysis? 6. In what ways do the critiques of Orientalism and Sinocentricism relate to the theme of queerness in these films? 7. Is Lan Yu (2001) or The Wedding Banquet (1993) a Sinophone film? Core Readings - Song Hwee Lim, “Screening Homosexuality,” in Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 19-40. - David Eng, “The Queer Space of China: Expressive Desire in Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu,” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, no. 2 (2010): 459-487. - Shu-mei Shih, “Globalization and Minoritization,” in Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (University of California Press, 2007), 40-61. - Rey Chow, “The Dream of a Butterfly,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (Routledge, 1996), 61-92. Further Readings

 

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Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006). Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, eds., Queer Sinophone Cultures (Routledge, 2013). David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2001). Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre (Routledge, 1997). Helen Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2008). Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book (British Film Institute, 2011). Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (University of Hawaii Press, 2007). Sheldon H. Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (University of Hawaii Press, 1997). Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (University of Hawaii Press, 2005). Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (University of California Press, 2007). Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013). Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, eds., “From Diasporic to Sinophone Cinemas,” special issue, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 1 (2012). Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, eds., Sinophone Cinemas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004). Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). Yingjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (University of Michigan, 2002). *Tuesday History & Film Seminar, 5pm, SO.20: Dr. Melanie Bell, Newcastle University, “A History of Women in the British Film and Television Industries” Wednesday screening: Las poquianchis (2003), 1-3, SO.17 Week 9: Mexican History/Mexican Cinema Seminar Tutor: Dr. Ben Smith Contact: [email protected] Key films: Las poquianchis (2003)

 

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All read: Jorge Ibarguengoitia, The Dead Girls (1983) and Debra A. Castillo, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (1998) Seminar questions and additional readings to be circulated in week 6.

Wednesday screening: The Conformist (1970), 1-3, SO.17 Week 10: Cinema and the Representation of Fascism Seminar Convenor: Professor Stephen Gundle (Wednesday 10-1, room TBA) Contact: [email protected] Film: Il conformista/The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) Assigned reading: Either: C. Wagstaff, Il conformista (BFI Classic) pp.96 Or: J. Kline, ‘The Conformist’ in G. Bertellini (ed.), The Cinema of Italy Supplementary reading: 1. Cinema and Fascism Gundle, S., Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy Ricci, S., Cinema & Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 Hay, J., Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy Landy, M., Fascism in Film: Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 Reich, J. and Garofalo, P. (eds.), Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema 1922-1943 Forgacs, D. and Gundle, S., Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War Ben-Ghiat, R., Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945 2. Histories of Italian Cinema Bondanella, P., Italian Cinema From Neorealism to the Present Bondanella, P. A History of Italian Cinema Brunetta, G.P. The History of Italian Cinema Landy, M., Italian Film Liehm, M., Passion and Defiance: film in Italy from 1942 to the present Wood, M., Italian Cinema Sorlin, P., Italian National Cinema, 1896-1996 3. Italian Memory Wars Foot, J. Italy’s Divided Memory

 

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Cooke, P.E. The Legacy of the Italian Resistance Gundle, S. et al. (eds) The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians (Part IV) Bosworth, R. and P.Dogliani (eds.), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation Lichtner, G. Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945 Minghelli, G. Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Assessment Students are assessed on one assessed essay of 5,000 words (due in week 11) and one optional unassessed essay of 2,500 words. The course is taught in weekly 2-hour seminars. All History & Film MA students are expected to attend the History & Film seminar series, which meets Tuesday evenings in weeks 4 and 8. The full programme for 2014-15 is available on the course website. Students are encouraged to visit the British Film Institute, Mass Observation Archive, and/or the National Archives at Kew to develop original research topics on film. Any initial enquiries should be directed at the module/course convenor, Dr. Smyth.

 

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