Expanded Course Description

In 1915, an American Supreme Court decision declared moviemaking a “business, pure and simple,” thus appointing a strict industrial role to cinema as a producer of “harmless entertainment” (Braun et all, 1). While cinema continues to be undeniably tied to business and entertainment industries, this course considers the evolving public motivations of cinema as social, civic, and political. This course asks you to consider the policies and politics that circulate beyond and around screens and that evolve into various forms of public networks, as production institutions, festivals, circuits, and collectives. While it is impossible to consider the form of cinema outside of its industrial influences and contexts, this course will ask you to consider how modes of production and distribution are influenced by its audiences. 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?

In this course, we will interrogate various theories and meanings of “public.” For example, we will discuss Jürgen Habermas’s foundational theory of the public sphere; distinguish between “the public” and “a public” with the help of Michael Warner; and consider challenges to liberal democratic public spheres by reading about counter-publics from feminists, queer, racialized, and Indigenous thinkers 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 public” has come to denote specific expectations for cinematic production, exhibition and distribution.

You will note three overarching questions throughout the various readings, films and case studies presented in this course:

1. The first addresses relationships between social movements and cinematic movements. Throughout the weeks, we will ask how these overlapping publics inform each other. At stake for this question is the democratizing potentials (and pitfalls) of cinematic publics. We will evaluate how cinema has been used as a political practice of communication for marginalized and/or activist peoples. We will ask: what factors influence relationships between cinema, collective action, and social change?
2. The second major question interrogates the nation’s relationships with more localized cinematic publics. We will look at how certain publics have interpreted the role of participatory and collective cinema/media production, exhibition and distribution despite overarching national media policies and funding models. How do local publics hold their own despite global and translational funding and distribution pressures? Following this line of questioning, we will ask: how can a cinematic public maintain connections to its local audiences, despite expanding transnational cinematic exhibition and digital distribution models?
3. The third major line of questioning interrogates cinematic publics in relation to shifting technologies. In this course, we will consider how publics have formed through emergent technologies across media histories (for example, through portable audio recording or as video art). We will also consider the rapidly changing influences of digital technologies and online cultures upon cinema. We will ask: how are new cinematic publics formed in relation to social media interactions, and with the rise of online big data and digital surveillance?