Film & Media Studies 333 - Doing Film History: Kenji Mizoguchi

(Offered as ASLC 333 and FAMS 333.) This course provides students with the opportunity to do film history on multiple levels, focusing on one of Japan’s most distinctive cinematic voices: Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956). Mizoguchi’s thirty-three-year career spanned multiple production companies and new technologies. He made over eighty features, of which less than half survive. Students will: learn how film historians draw conclusions from a corpus of evidence beyond films and screenplays; take up the challenge of trying to piece together the development of a directorial style with a limited number of extant films and fragments; relate film style to institutional developments in the production and exhibition of motion pictures in Japan; contextualize these finding within a larger social canvas, with special attention to changing gender ideology through modernization, war, and democracy; explore how the postwar festival circuit facilitates the global “discovery” of a non-European filmmaker; and consider factors that account for this filmmaker’s continually shifting place in a global canon of cinema. The course culminates in a final project in which each student will curate a retrospective film program, complete with explanatory and promotional materials.

Fall semester. Professor Van Compernolle.

How to handle overenrollment:

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Film viewing and analysis; class discussion; short writing assignments; a proposal and plan for a film retrospective.