Communication 390T - Triggered On Challenging Films

Challenging material unnerves us. Due to this, difficult to watch or triggering material can and is often readily dismissed by audiences, critics, and historians. Challenging material in film history can vary as historically opposition has emerged against pornography, experimental film, horror, political films, satire, underground work, punk, queer, and feminist content. Difficult films have been met with censorship, destruction, and protests, and yet artists continue to make work that disturbs, provokes, and challenges our senses. "Triggered!" is a course that will consider the thematic implications of what may constitute as triggering material in film. This includes topics on assault, formal experimentations, violence, sex, and so forth. This semester?s offering is organized around the thematic condition of "a woman in trouble." The woman in trouble trope is overuse in film history. It is the basis for many film noirs where the narrative structure is placed on a woman?s troubles and how might she preserve through them, or more cruelly, succumb to them.

COMM 140