Professor Julie Turnock

Mon, 1:00PM - 4:50PM

While the title of this course is “Historiography of Cinema,” it is designed to help you research and incorporate issues of moving image culture more broadly into your research agendas. Cinema studies provides the longest and most thorough discourse on moving image culture, and therefore this course introduces methodology and theory beneficial to students working on topics in television, video art, advertising, social media, digital media-making, and more. The aim of this class is to introduce and train students in research methods and approaches in moving image studies and discuss how the long tradition of cinematic scholarly discourse can impact research in other areas of media and various periods of technological emergence. The course is one of the two required courses for the Graduate Film Minor. 

The course is divided into three major sections; an introductory section and two case studies around sound and melodrama. The first three weeks, we will be discussing general historiographic topics and texts, with short assignments to orient you to the field. The next several weeks will concentrate on key historical texts in the history of sound and especially the emergence of sound technology in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the final section, we will discuss the historiographic emergence of melodrama as a field of academic inquiry. These texts will model various approaches to historical research, and just as importantly, the priority given to different kinds of evidence and the interpretation of that evidence.  There will be a screening (usually about 90min-2h) of a film appropriate to the following week’s reading. There will also be some screenings outside of class, but not every week.