This course offers a multifaceted investigation of art cinema, which has served as an essential model for audiences, filmmakers, and critics to envision cinema beyond Hollywood since the 1960s. The term “art cinema” is often linked with overtly artistic textuality, art-house theater exhibition, and the international circulation of “foreign” films. However, over the years, art cinema has intersected with popular genres, national cinemas, experimental film, and the avant-garde, blending corporate, state, and independent capital. Embedded in an imperialist and Eurocentric history, art cinema also provides both material for critique and inspiration for a diverse range of cinematic practices. This course will explore art cinema as a contested, dynamic, and hybrid category, which has, from its inception, established a relationship between the aesthetic and the geopolitical (or between cinema and the world). We will adopt a comparative, global perspective in our investigations of diverse examples of art cinema from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Iran, Turkey, Senegal, Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, and the US. We will engage pressing contemporary questions of globalization in relation to broader theoretical and aesthetic inquiries concerning the film image and its movements. Through our exploration of the historical significance and contemporary relevance of “art cinema,” we will critically consider the debates surrounding mainstream/avant-garde, local/cosmopolitan, history/theory, and industrial/formal issues in film scholarship and practice.HAAVC 3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the specific topic/theme. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created. This course cannot fulfill the HAAVC 2000 requirement.

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