Requirements

1. Each week students will read the assigned articles and book chapters and view the assigned films, as indicated in the Course Session modules. The readings can be accessed through Black Board, and the films can be accessed as mailed DVDs through Netflix. Therefore you will need to get a mailed DVD Netflix account for the duration of the course. Since there are no book costs for the course, the $7.99 per month cost of a Netflix DVD account should not be very onerous. (If you have access to a very good video store or public library, it may be possible to access the films without Netflix.) I have, however, been able to locate copies of Rules of the Game and Bicycle Thieves on YouTube, and have embedded them in this website in the appropriate sections.

2. Each week students will participate in written discussions of the course material in an electronic discussion group hosted by our Black Board site. Each student will write at least two paragraphs on a topic to be assigned each week, as well as respond in writing to the postings of at least two other students.

3. Each week students will listen to a lecture or read from a book by the instructor on the course material for that week; the lectures and book sections are archived on our Black Board site.

4. Students will write a midterm essay (approximately 6 double-spaced pages) based on the readings.

5. 5.Students will produce a final paper (10 to 15 double-spaced pages)
   

addressing questions in the philosophy of cinema based on the course readings, lectures, films, and discussions.

A note on the readings: some of the readings are excerpted from my book, Marxism and Film. Other readings are from Andre Bazin,  Jean-Luc Godard,  Cesare Zavattini,  Walter Benjamin , and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others.

Grading

The course requirements have the following weight in determining the final grade for the course:

Midterm exam = 30%

Participation in group discussions = 30%

Final paper = 40%

Instructor Information

Instructor: Gary Zabel, Ph.D.

Department of Philosophy, UMB

Office: Wheatley 5/040

Office Hours: Mon, Wed 4:00-5:00 and by appointment

Email: gary.zabel@umb.edu

Website: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel

Course Description

What is the relation between film and philosophy? The twentieth-century French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze answers, surprisingly, that they are very closely related. Film-makers think about the same themes as philosophers, but philosophers think in concepts while film-makers think in images. Thus film-making is like philosophy in that it is primarily a form of thought. Philosophy is also like film-making in that, according to Deleuze, it is creative. The philosopher creates new concepts just as the film-maker creates new images. In short, philosophy is just as much art as film-making is thought.

What do philosophers and film-makers think about through the creation of concepts in the first case and images in the second? Of course, the answer is many things, such as the meaning of life, the significance of death, the problematic character of relations between human beings, and so on. But philosophy and film-making converge on a principal and fundamental topic, namely the nature and significance of time. What is time? What does it mean to be caught up in time? How can the present have any reality if it is always passing, slipping through our fingers whenever we try to grasp it? But if the present has no reality, then how can there be a past or future, since the past must once have been present and the future must become so? Even if the present is real, how can the past and future be real, since the past is no longer present and the future is not yet present. But if past and future are not real, then how can the present be real, since the present is simply the threshold where the future becomes past? These may seem like abstract questions, but they are not. The paradoxes of time are the paradoxes of our lives, because we have no lives at all part from the time in which they unfold.

Philosophers have been thinking about the nature of time ever since philosophy began around 2500 years ago, while there have been film-makers only since 1895. Still, film-makers are at no disadvantage in relation to philosophers in this respect, because filmmaking comes along during a period when there is a deep-seated change in our experience of time, a change that philosophy must also address. In the modern epoch - say the past few hundred years - time has acquired a new importance. From Plato down through the Middle Ages, time was devalued in relation to eternity. Life is short but eternity is unending. Life is no more than a preparation or a test for determining the place of our souls in the eternity that awaits us after death. That was the traditional view. But in the modern period, there is a revalutation of the temporal and the eternal, an inversion in their relative importance. Time becomes more significant than eternity, whether or not one believes in an existence after death. Time is the only thing that the living really know, so that it is time, not eternity, that we must understand. Such understanding is the key to physics and biology as well as philosophy and cinema - think of the revolution in science caused by Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time, or Darwin’s theory that species emerge, develop, and perish over the course of time. In any event, film-making first comes on the scene when the traditional relationship between time and eternity has been inverted. What makes cinema important in this respect is that it is the art of time, in the same way that painting is the art of color and form, or music is the art of sound. The Russian film-maker, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote an illuminating book titled Sculpting in Time. The title is paradoxical (which was undoubtedly Tarkovsky’s intention), because the moving image is always changing, while the sculpture persists unchanged. Aristotle wrote that time is the measure of motion. We can reverse this and say that the moving image is the measure  of time. This is what makes cinema - also known as the movies - the art of time.

The fulcrum of Deleuze’s two-volume work, Cinema, is its treatment of film in its relation to time. In this course, we will read Cinema, and view and discuss some of the films treated within it. They include  L’Atalante (Jean Vigo), Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Theodor Dreyer) Exterminating Angel (Louis Bunel), The Man who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford),  Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock), L’Aventura (Michelangelo Antonioni), Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais ), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles),  films and film clips by Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers, and Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard).

This course is also part of an experiment in open  access. I am giving a free version of the course without academic credit in Google Hangouts. Hangouts allows for the participation of ten people in a simultaneous video-conferencing session, similar to a traditional classroom. Five students will be taking the course without cost or credit, which means that there will be room in any given session for four students from the paid, credited course. The sessions will be broadcast live as well as recorded on YouTube, and a text program will be used to permit participation in the live sessions from the YouTube stream.  The Hangout sessions with live streaming will take place every Thursday from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. I encourage students who are enrolled in this course for credit to attend the Thursday sessions and participate in the lectures and discussions in real time. Those who are unable to do so will make need to make written contributions to our Black Board site responding to the recorded sessions on YouTube.

Requirements

1. Each week students will read the assigned book chapters and view the assigned films. The readings and films can be accessed through the relevant pages of this website (links to the pages are at the  top of this and every other page). Five of the films are free and on YouTube. Students will have to rent the others through YouTube or Amazon, or find them in some other way (your public library is always a good place to check). Each film that carries a cost runs between $4 and $5, and there are no other expenses for the course besides tuition and fees for those taking it for credit. Readings from Deleuze’s Cinema are provided free of charge. Total expenses for course materials should be a little more than $30.

2. Each week students will participate in the lectures and discussions of course material live in Google Hangouts, live-streamed on YouTube and connected to the Hangouts session through a text program, or recorded on YouTube with responses submitted to an electronic discussion board hosted by our Black Board site.

3. Students will write a midterm essay (approximately 6 double-spaced pages) based on the readings and lectures-discussions.

4. Students will produce a final paper (10 to 15 double-spaced pages)

addressing questions in the philosophy of cinema based on the course readings, lectures, films, and discussions.

Grading

The course requirements have the following weight in determining the final grade for the course:

Midterm exam = 30%

Participation in group discussions = 30%

Final paper = 40%

Of course, there are no exam or paper requirements or grades for students taking the free version of the course.

Below is a video of Deleuze (who died in 1995) lecturing on the philosophy of film. He is speaking in French. Even if you don’t speak French, it is interesting to watch a bit of the video to get a sense of who Deleuze was. You will notice that he speaks in a quiet, somewhat breathless voice. He suffered from tuberculosis, had a lung removed, and spent the last years of his life in an iron lung in his apartment in Paris. He ended by committing suicide by jumping from his apartment window.