English 2723 Fiction, Drama, Film and Screen
BMH 101 Mon and Wed 4:00-5:20
Dr.Stewart Donovan sdonovan@stu.ca
Office 307 EC Hall
Office hours: Mon 2:00-3:30, Wednesday 2:00- 3:30, or by appointment.
Evaluation
(1) Essay 20%
(2) Journal (35%)
(3) Class mark 5%
(4) Final exam: take home or in-class essay: 40%
Course Syllabus (2025)
Description
This course is designed to study film and screen as narrative. The theoretical and critical approach is primarily from a cultural studies perspective, but students will also be introduced to the intellectual history of cinema and streaming and its relation to art, entertainment, aesthetics, politics, race, gender, and general culture.
Method: Lecture, Q & A; Class viewing with “Professor assisted “Auteur: Director/Producer Cut” commentary, and edited montage sequences.
Recommended Text and Sites:
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson
Cultural Theory: An Anthology by Imre Szeman and Timothy Kapos
Open Access Essays on film and culture by Professor Donovan essays https://stthomasu.academia.edu/StewartDonovan
First assignment:
Your first essay can be on themes of Margaret's Museum and its extraction culture; the 500-year-old woman’s world of Much Ado About Nothing; the sanitized and confused gay world of Hollywood’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Students may also write an essay on the thematic concerns of Chinatown and its place in the wake of the ground-breaking influence of the international New Wave on the “new” Hollywood. The first deadline is Wed, February 12, 2025. papers. Your paper should be between 6 and 8 typed pages double spaced, between 1500 and 2000 words.
Journal
A more informal style of writing, your journal should record notes from class, conversations with fellow students, family, friends et. al. about cinema, and streaming its cultural, political, and artistic impact. The journal/notebook should also highlight research you have been doing, reading and viewing you will have done in the library or on the net. This is the independent learning section of the course. There is a large section of Hollywood, Independent, Art House, Auteur and Foreign cinema on reserve for this course and students are expected to become familiar with some of them. Students with access to streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple tv and Criterion will find a good and bad selection there. You will be expected to write reviews and summaries of their themes, plots, performances and style and to make comparisons with other films you have seen over your lifetime of film viewing. You will also be expected to comment on the nature of film and streaming culture: how it has changed and where it might be headed: culturally, politically, artistically. You should try to write/ compose at least two entries per week. The length of these entries depends on your writing skills but try to avoid point form. Set a goal of one to two pages per week. Remember that the journal is also a writing and communicating exercise. Do not fear the blank page, as no one learns how to write well overnight. You must, however, try to critique the celebrity culture that has largely been the background of your movie-going experience. Try to step back from it and critique its negative qualities while appraising the merits of film and streaming culture in general. The journal should be passed in on the last day of class. Students can show me and chat about their journal entries and class material at any time.
[Note: you should be aware of and, at the same time, beware the temptation of AI for your content; its grammar and syntax create a basic and functional journalistic style, not yet at the level of acceptable Mandarin, but remember it was created by capitalism, so it naturally seeks to commodify humans and their culture. Think Meta and FB. If you approach it with even rudimentary Marxist, or leftist thought, in general, it will very quickly reveal its servile and programmed reactionary agenda, especially in matters economic, political, and artistic.]
Exam
You must do your final exam as a take home open book essay. You will be given 6 or more questions on the last day of classes from which you will choose two questions and write two essays from four to six typed pages in length, approximately 500 words per page. All take homes are due on the day of the exam.
Only a legitimate excuse from the Registrar’s office will be accepted for late exams or papers at the end of term.
Texts and Films Recommended
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson
Cultural Theory: An Anthology by Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy
Virtual Horders 2021, Catherine Liu.
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams http://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/76523768/Cat%20on%20a%20Hot%20Tin%20Roof.pdf
Margaret's Museum by Sheldon Currie
Course Outline
Topics and Lectures
1. Chinatown: neo-noir and the portrayal of women in cinema; new wave influence on Hollywood’s first Studio Interregnum: from Peckinpah to Jaws. Patriarchy, power, and Herbert Hoover’s water. Engineering the desert of the “American Dream”. In his travelogue, The American Scene, 1907, written after his return to America in 1904-05 after a long absence, Henry James, greatest living novelist in English at the time, famously wrote that “America is the world’s largest appetite and Canada the world’s largest morsel.” South Park Streaming Wars.
2. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof: how not to open the celluloid closet; the Empire, patriarchy, and late consumer capitalism, from China to Amazon and back. Cinema and the legacy of Tennessee Williams from Streetcar Named Desire to Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) the Celluloid Closet (Vito Russo) Crossing, 2024 (Levan Akin, Sweden, Türkiye) Joyland, 2022, Pakistan (Saim Sadiq won the Queer Palm award at Cannes for this seminal trans gem).
3. Much Ado About Nothing: Screening Shakespeare for the masses from Olivier to Taymor’s Titus. The soft power of the Brits meets the harder power of Hollywood: the MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the zenith of prosperity in the heartland of the White Settler World.4. Antonia’s Line: European standards from Agnes Varda to Clio Barnard.
5 Margaret’s Museum: Life down home, a remembrance of time past. Climate change and the honour and shame culture from Cape Breton to West Virginia. The working poor and fossil fascism from Landman: from West Texas to Fort McMurray. The Legacy of Second Wave Feminism: sexual freedom versus the demonization of the working class.
6 John Sayles: Passion Fish: Louisiana legacy: the Acadian ghosts of expulsion; Spike Lee when the Levees Broke; Werner Herzog, the Bad Lieutenant in the time of Katrina. Human rights and Angola Prison.
7 Blanc/White: First Poland then Ukraine. Kieslowski’s art for Europe. Blue, Blanc, et Rouge. Ken Loach,A Fond Kiss; Aki Kaurismäki,A Man Without A Past; the Dardenne brothers:seeking socialism.
8 3 Iron: K-cinema mixing genres in the shadow of empires, from The Host to Paarasite.
9 All About My Mother, the career of Almodovar:
10 Mulholland Drive: Hollywood after Lynch.
11 Y Tu Mama Tambien: Out of Mexico from Buñuel to del Toro.
12: Lars Von Trier and the legacy of the Scandinavian Screen, from Joan of Arc to Another Round.
13 It’s A Free World by Ken Loach.
14. From Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali to All We Imagine is Light, Payal Kapadia.
Useful links•
Copyright © 2025 Dr. Stewart Donovan