About FILM 3610G

“For the cinema functions both as a public sphere of its own, defined by specific relations of representation and reception, and as part of a larger social horizon, defined by other media, by overlapping local, national and global, face-to-face and deterritorialized structures of public life”

 – Miriam Hansen, 1993.

This course asks you to consider the policies and politics that circulate around screens and various forms of public networks: production institutions, festivals, circuits, and collectives. Some of our foregrounding questions will be: How is cinema mobilized by various institutional mandates and social ideals? How has cinema evolved into a mode of public address? How does cinema produce its own social formations?

We will interrogate various theories and meanings of “publics” and audiences, and public spheres. We will also consider challenges to liberal democratic public spheres by studying examples of counter- publics from feminists, queer, racialized, and Indigenous thinkers, media makers and activists. As we collectively try to understand how thinking through concepts of “publicness” can relate to mobs, crowds, infrastructures, fairs, politics and gatherings, we will consider how “a cinematic public” has come to influence specific expectations for cinematic production, exhibition and distribution.

Questions about the course? Email the instructor: csicondo@yorku.ca