Film, Video, and American History
AMST S483 (CRN: 30038)
Instructors: Melinda Stang
Dates: Session A, May 26 - June 27, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: TTh 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
In-person Course. This course will take a hard, imaginative, speculative, and poetic look at U.S. history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lens of film and video. In a time where we are awash with moving images in our environments on a daily, if not minute-by-minute basis, this course will be a space to meditate upon the sights, sounds, and texts around us. We will interrogate how we have been trained to read a moving image. We will place the image historically, aesthetically, politically. We will learn how to see history as a series of discontinuities, yet with unconscious repetitions, thematic overlaps, and eternal returns — not simply as a single thread of greatest hits and milestones moments. Topics will include: Empire, Language, Love (viz. the Screwball Comedy), Class, War and Empire, Politics, Communism, Ideology, Youth, Revolt, Postmodernity, the Network, and Memory. Periods and events covered include: The Black Freedom Struggle, The Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II, the Long 1960s, the U.S. failure in Vietnam, the Dot Com Boom and Silicon Valley, and contemporary activist/revolutionary movements. We will not consider the U.S. in isolation: films and discussions will inevitably take us to Latin America, to France, to Senegal, to Iran, and to the Soviet Union. We will have mandatory Monday night screenings as well; these will include moving-image work by Julie Dash, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Tashlin, Douglas Sirk, Barbara Loden, Jane Schoenbrun, Anthony Banua-Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Don Hertzfeldt, Vincente Minnelli, Chuck Jones, Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Frédéric Da, Spike Lee, Walt Disney, Warren Beatty, Brian De Palma, Richard Lester, and Eric André, among a host of others. This course seeks to expand students' knowledge of the history of film, of U.S. culture, and the society in which they exist. 1 Credit. Session A: May 26 – June 27. Tuition: $5270.