CSCL1922: Films Noir: History, Change, Sex, and Violence

This Freshman seminar enjoys and explores films noir through several theoretical models, and in our analyses of its fascinating historical, and our current, contexts. This is a course that is central to the CSCL and SCMC curricula, and it also offers compelling critical approaches through which we are able to receive, discuss, and write about film. Our design for this seminar aims toward students developing their own analytic voices and perspectives with which they may not only enter key debates in film studies, but that will apply to other courses and fields of cultural knowledge as well.Specifically, we will focus on the relationships between pulp fiction's social/economic emergence after World War II, and how this particular "low" literature altered and funded the French New Wave and Hollywood cinema, as well as echoing worldwide film trends in China, England, Japan, and other nations. In thinking of gender and race as well, these pulps generally broke into forms either in tandem with Melodrama or the lie within the tenets of the post-created genre, Film Noir. The complex interplay between Race, sexual orientation, and class, and between "female" models and "masculine" cinema delivers rich and generative material for understanding cinema within social history.

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