Film Studies 597E - ST- Strange Engagements

An exploration international films and literary texts that seek news ways of recovering from past time lives and events that otherwise might be lost in the oblivion of dead memory. Drawing on theories of photography, narrative, memory, genre, postmodernism, and otherness, we engage questions of figuration and truth. How can filmmakers and writers create narratives that, in a sense, rescue the lives of the dead? Documentaries, histories, biographies, historical fiction, bio-pics?these are all invaluable to engaging, recording, and expressing the past. Yet before these familiar genres readers and audiences might become complacent or little moved beyond the information value of the texts. This course deals with narrative works that take innovative, often enigmatic or vertiginous forms in order to recount the past in ways that evoke empathy, spur curiosity, activate the imagination, and move beyond genre in the effort to do justice to lives and experiences of the past. Films by Agnes Varda, Werner Herzog, Patricio Guzman, Diana Groo, Michael Haneke, and others. Literary works by Anne Carson, W.G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Auster, and others. Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students.