Film and Video - Winter 1998

Instructor:
Dr. Harry M. Benshoff
Porter College D124
ext. 9-3991

E-mail: benshoff@cats

This class is designed to introduce students to the analytical study of television--the elements which structure its overall form and the differing methodological approaches used to make sense of it. Despite its location near the bottom of a cultural hierarchy of visual media (e.g. Movies are Art, Television is Furniture), television in the late twentieth century is an ubiquitous medium through which most people filter their own experiences and learn about the world around them. Our goals in this class will include studying the constitutive elements of television form, how they differ from or relate to other visual language systems (such as Hollywood film), and how television shapes and is shaped by the cultural forces that it encompasses.

Toward that end, the first half of the class will focus on the formal elements of televisual style, while the second half explores broader questions of genre, spectatorship, postmodernism, alternative televisions, and the like.

Jeremy Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications

Horace Newcomb, Ed., Television Criticism, 5th Edition

Attendance and Participation in Class and Weekly Discussion Sections

One Midterm Exam

One Final Exam

One Short Written Paper (4-5) pages

One Longer Essay (6-7) pages

Instructor: Dr. Harry M. Benshoff, Porter College D124, ext. 9-3991.
E-mail: benshoff@cats.

The Western film genre--quintessentially AMERICAN--is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, easily considered one of the most reactionary of Hollywood genres. Through its construction of individualistic and violent macho men with Divine Patriarchal Law on their side, the genre has often run roughshod over women and almost all minority groups. Many theorists agree that the American ideology of manifest destiny (which the classical Western usually plays out to some degree) is used within the genre as a RjustificationS for the racial genocide of Native American cultures; it can also be understood as a metaphoric expression of US cultural imperialism during the Cold War years.

That said, the genre is, like most Hollywood film genres, tremendously resilient and polyvocal--it continues to manifest itself in various forms, although the period of westernUs greatest popularity has long since passed. From the earliest silent film manifestations of the genre to recent attempts by feminist and African American filmmakers to reappropriate the genre, the class will examine the changing meanings of the Western mythology, exploring the work of major Western filmmakers such as John Ford and Sam Peckinpah, famous Western stars such as John Wayne, Willian S. Hart, and Gene Autry, how the Western constructs gender, sexuality, and race, and how the genre balances narrative tensions surrounding issues of individualism and conformity.

Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie

John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique

Course Reader of Miscellaneous Essays

Attendance and Participation in Class Sessions

Completion of all Reading Assignments

One Short Paper (4-5 pages)

One Longer Paper (10 pages)

One Midterm Examination

One Final Examination

Revised 7/12/04.