English 3673A The Film and Screen of Politics
Dr. Stewart Donovan
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00 PM to 2:20PM
BMH 101
Syllabus English 3673 The Film and Screen of Politics
sdonovan@stu.ca
Office 307 EC Hall
Office hours: Mon 2:00-3:30, Wednesday 2:00- 3:30, or by appointment.
Course Syllabus (2025)Evaluation(1) Essay 20%(2) Journal (35%)(3) Class mark 5%(4) Final exam: take home or in-class essay: 40%
Essay: Choose two political films from the class list and two of your own choosing and write an essay on their political themes. Your essay should be between six and eight typed pages double spaced. Your essay is due on Thursday, February 13th.
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 its cultural impact. The journal/notebook should also highlight research you have been doing: reading and viewing you will have done. This is the independent learning section of the course. There is a large section of Hollywood, Independent, Art House, Auteur and World cinema at our library. Students with access to Netflicks, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Criterion, Mubi and the myriad of other streaming services will find a good and bad endless selection. You will be expected to write reviews and summaries of their themes, plots, performances, and style and to make comparisons with other films and streaming you have seen over your years of viewing. You should try to write/ compose at least a couple of entries per week, but many prefer to do this towards the end of term. Your choice. The length of these entries depends on your writing skills but try to avoid point form. [Note: avoid and beware of the temptation of AI: 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 of leftist thought, it will very quickly reveal its programmed reactionary agenda, especially in matters political.] Set a goal then of one or two pages per week and 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. Your journal should be passed in on the last day of class. If students need feedback they can show me their journal entries at any time.
Lesson I
Cinema: Power and soft power. Hollywood, Hegemony, and Ideology: Democracy, Communism and Fascism.
Entertainment versus Art; Slavoj Zizek: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. The war epic and the beginnings of overt political cinema. D.W. Griffiths: Hollywood, Americans, and Birth of a Nation—the racist epic and its legacy. Paisan by Roberto Rossellini from a Black American GI to Spike Lee’s cinema verité response to race in urban America. The Watchman (Regina King) in Oklahoma 1923; Jules, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Django, Jordan Peele: Get Out and Nope; The Good Lord Bird; John Ford Riding for the Clan: demonization of indigenous Americans. Streaming Eisenstein: agit prop and the working class. From All Quiet on the Western Front and The Grand Illusion to John Wayne, Iwo Jimo, Saving Private Ryan, and Inglorious Basterds. All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone, 1930. 1917 (Mendes.)
Part Two
Luis Buñuel, surrealism, sexuality, and the Catholic Church: from L’Age d’Or to Viridiana. Pans Labyrinth and Spanish Fascism. Roberto Rossellini and the invention of Italian neo-realism: Rome, Open City, Paisan and Germany Year 1.
Lesson II
In the wake of neo-realism: post war Polish cinema of Andrzej Wajda: Kanal. The Third Man (1949). Graham Greene, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. The Tin Drum.
Lesson III
Gillo Pontecorvo's, The Battle of Algiers, 1966.Object Lessons. Speaking truth to power in the colonial wars. Considered by many to be the greatest political film in the history of cinema. Influenced by Italian neo-realism, Pontecorvo's masterpiece is a template for all political cinema. Recommended Readings: from Frantz Fanon' The Wretched of the Earth. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/conclusion.htmhttps://frantz-fanon.webs.com/
Lesson IV
Auteurs and the Portrayal of Women : from Bergman to Fassbender an intro.
Plenty: David Hare, Meryl Streep, and First Wave Feminism. Antonia’s Line, All About My Mother. The Imitation Game (the Alan Turing story).
Lesson V
Streaming the Empire
Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, Vietnam, My Lai, and the Myth of the American West. Apocalypse Now, the limits of satire and irony. Bonnie and Clyde, Patriot: Steve Conrad/Michael Dorman. Narcos , Season One Episode 4; Taylor Sheridan: Streaming Western Revisionism: (Urban and Rural) Hell or High Water, Yellowstone, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness (parody of Zero Dark Thirty) and Landman. Sheridan is, among other things, the Sam Peckinpah of streaming. His art often topples over into entertainment, but he is always provocative and sometimes subversive (perhaps unconsciously so). But he is the screen writer of the Zeitgeist, of our times, and he is prolific.
Lesson VI
Black Rain: Shohei Imamura representing Hiroshima. And not representing Hiroshima: Oppenheimer.
Lesson VII
Incendies, La Llorona.
Lesson VIII
The Quiet American, Phillip Noyce and Graham Greene exposing empire. Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. The Big Lebowski and Vietnam.
Lesson IX
Robert Redford's Quiz Show:Recommended Readings: Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion: Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Lesson X
Coming in from the dark: indigenous days and nightsOnce Were Warriors, apart from Orcs and the demonized other. The Fast Runner, Smoke Signals, The Revenant, Roma (Cuarón). Streaming people of colour: from the multiverse to the endless worlds of fantasy.
Lesson XI
Living in the end times or apocalypse on the installment plan. Parasite (2019)
Lesson XII The War on the working class by liberalism and neo liberalism.
Ken Loach’s: It’s A Free World, I am Daniel Blake, Parasite, A Fond Kiss,