Currently teaching at NYU my survey course: International Cinema: 1960 to Present
(Screenshots taken from three movies I adore: Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960, Japan), Touki Bouki (Djibril diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, Iran)
Film scholar James Tweedie observes that in our “tendency to catalog films within familiar geographical, industrial, or linguistic boundaries,” we overlook “their most innovative and revelatory dimensions: their repetition and simultaneity in various locations and their resistance to the habitual attribution of local place-name.”
This course will oscillate between the national and the transnational to provide an overview of networks, trends, connections, and interactions within global cinema from 1960 onwards. The course will introduce key concepts and methods for approaching the study of world cinema. We will trace prominent national and transnational post-war movements that challenged Hollywood’s aesthetics and values. Many of the films we will watch in this course share similar thematic and aesthetic concerns. Concerns that cross borders include: postwar trauma and historical revisionism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, intergenerational conflict and youth culture, post-colonialism and growing national consciousness, gender oppression and degrees of liberation, and the ambivalence towards or embrace of global capitalism. We will also consider the growing prestige of art cinema and film festival circuits.
By the end of this course you will have the knowledge and vocabulary required to analyze and write about international films within their broader cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, while remaining ever-mindful of the complexities and problematic nature of what it means to discuss “global cinema.”