FILM STUDIES 219G

Wednesday 7-10 (UC85), Friday 9-11 (UC12)

ALTERNATE REALITIES: ONTOLOGICAL

SHIFTING IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

Dr. Doug Mann - UC 76, SSC 5320

In this course we’ll look at the capacity of modern cinema to explore alternate realities, to perform ontological shifts from where we are right now – our current social, political, cultural, and aesthetic realities – to some other place, some other personal or collective truth. This obviously points to science fiction, which has engaged in ontological shifting from its very beginnings, when Georges Méliès fired a bullet-shaped rocket ship into a wincing man in the moon in his 1902 A Voyage to the Moon to recent films such as The Matrix and eXistenZ. But it also can be seen in other genres that use psychological dislocation caused by drugs, sex, or violence to experiment with the effects of this shifting on a film’s main character or characters, and in “postmodern” cinema that uses cultural recycling from non-cinematic pop cultural forms such as the computer game, the music video, or television news shows. We’ll look at a number of mostly recent such experiments in ontological shifting, and have lots of dialogue about how it works along the way.

TEXTS

Alternate Realities Reader, ed. Doug Mann. See below for exact readings.

WORKLOAD

Warm-up Test (February 9): 10%. Will cover the first month or so of course material with a combination of multiple-choice, short answer, and/or an essay question. About 1 hour. I’ll announce the exact format in class. It will take place, appropriately enough, before Memento, a movie about a man who can’t remember anything. The material on this test will be de-emphasized (though present) on the final exam. There’s no makeup test – if you miss it due to illness or a family tragedy (the only valid reasons) you’ll have to do a short makeup essay.

Seminar Attendance/Participation: 15%. I’ll divide you up into 2 seminars (depending on the size of the class – only one if it’s small), Groups A and B, which will alternate meeting over the last 10 weeks of the class, one hour per week. Each seminar will usually discuss two weeks’ worth of material (both films and texts), but will be driven by your film reviews. Each seminar will be worth 3%: 1 point for attending the full seminar, 2 points for minimal participation, 3 for substantial participation. In addition, I’ll boost the seminar grades of the 5 or 6 students who most regularly attend lectures and participate from 1 to 3 points, up to a maximum of 15% (if you miss three or more lectures you’re off the list!). In most cases you’ll be divided into pairs who share the work of the presentation.

Seminar Film Review: 15%. Each student or pair of students will be asked to review one of the films seen in class in terms of the basic theme of the course: how it promotes a shift in reality in some way. 2 typed, double-spaced pages, 11-12 point font (I will penalize longer reviews), presented in seminar. You’ll be graded mainly, but not entirely, on your written work. Don’t just discuss the plot of the movie or repeat the lectures; instead, focus on your own ideas of how the film describes some sort of ontological shifting. Avoid long quotes. Due the day of the presentation.

You’re free to bring in whatever elements you want given this basic premise, including techniques used by the filmmaker to promote this shifting, the distortions of conventional values in the film, the narrative role of dreams, the free will (or lack thereof) of the film’s central characters, the social and political repercussions of the film, notions of beauty and the sublime evoked by the cinematic image, rethinking sexual identities, or reflections on life in a technological age. I’m looking for a theoretical analysis of the film in question.

I will divide you into pairs (we don’t have enough time for 30+ individual presentations) after the January 12 class and assign each pair a film to review UNLESS you volunteer as a pair to review a specific film before that date. If you really want to present by yourself, that’s fine too, although pairs won’t be penalized for only doing half as much work. Only one presentation on each film in each seminar group, first come, first served.

Normally I’ll limit each seminar to 2 reviews, and each seminar will cover only 2 films, so that means each seminar will usually consist of two pairs of students presenting. You’ll have half of the 50 minute seminar for your presentation, but please time your presentations to last no more than 15 minutes to allow some time for discussion. You don’t have to read them – you can present your review in any way you like (though mime is out of the question).

Final Essay: 30%. Choose two of the films we’ve watched in class (or three with my permission) and compare and critically evaluate how they engage in ontological shifting. You can’t use the same film you discussed in your seminar film review. Feel free to use any of the subsidiary themes mentioned in the seminar review description above. Make sure you have some sort of thesis in your paper, and that you use at least a couple of the texts from the courseware. Due April 6 in class. Late penalty: 2% per day. Examples of possible topics:

• Gender and Violence in Fight Club and Natural Born Killers
• Shifting Conventional Sexuality in Crash and Eyes Wide Shut
• What is Personal Identity? The Cases Made by Memento and AI
• Does Memory Create our Personal Reality? Compare two of Memento, Vanilla Sky, The Matrix, eXistenZ , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Disrupting Temporal Structure in Run, Lola, Run and Naked Lunch or Memento
• The Question of Free Will – Any two films in the course
• The Mythic Quest in Excalibur and either Run Lola Run, The Matrix , AI, or Waking Life
• Christian vs. Nietzschean Ethics in Excalibur and Natural Born Killers
• The Reality Dream of Consumerism in Fight Club and Waking Life
• Has Technology Turned Us into Different Beings? – Compare two of Excalibur, AI, eXistenz, The Matrix, Crash, Natural Born Killers
• Is Virtual Reality Better than Waking Life? – Compare Waking Life with either The Matrix or eXistenZ

The essay should be 6-8 pages, 11-12 point font, double-spaced. Make sure you keep a copy on your hard disk. See my essay-writing notes at: http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann

Final Exam: 30%. This will cover the entire course, including lectures, films, and texts. 2 hours, with a mixture of short-answer questions and long essays.

SCHEDULE (Dates refer to Wednesday screenings – I might use a half hour or so on Wednesdays to finish off the previous week’s lecture)

January 5 Ø Myth as Reality: Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981). P Readings: (1) Michel Ciment, John Boorman (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 179-83, 185, 188, 192, 196-7, 200-1. (2) Philip Kemp, “Gone to Earth,” Sight & Sound January 2001: 22-24. (3) Muriel Whitaker, “Fire, Water, Rock: Elements of Setting in Excalibur,” Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film, ed. Kevin J. Harty (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 135-143. (4) M. B. Shichtman, “Hollywood’s New Weston: the Grail Myth in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and John Boorman’s Excalibur,” Post Script 4.1 (1984): 35-48.

January 12 Ø Yet Another Karmic Computer Game/Music Video/Action Film: Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, Germany, 1998). … Readings: (1) Tom Whalen, “Run Lola Run,” Film Quarterly 53:3 (2000): 33-40. (2) Doug Mann, “Play Lara Play, Run Lola Run: Reflections on Postmodern Comic Book and Video Game Culture,” unpublished.

January 19 Ø Auto-Erotica: Crash (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1996). … Readings: (1) Mikita Brottman and Christopher Sharrett, “The End of the Road: David Cronenberg's Crash and the Fading of the West,” Literature/Film Quarterly 30/2 (2002): 126-132. (2) Botting, Wilson, Grant & Creed, “The Crash Debate,” Screen 39/2 (1998): 175-192. (3) Joel Black, “Literature, Film, and Virtuality: Technology's Cutting Edge,” Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death, eds. James E. Swearingen, Joanne Cutting-Gray, New York: Cotinuum, 2002, pp. 78-88.

January 26 Ø Dangerous Sexual Fantasies: Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, USA/UK, 1999). … Readings: (1) Larry Gross “Too Late the Hero,”Sight & Sound September 1999: 20-23. (2) Amy Taubin, “Imperfect Love,” Richard T. Jameson, “Ghost Sonata,” Film Comment 35/5, Sept-Oct 1999: 24-28, 30-31, 33. (3) Siegfried Kracauer, “Basic Concepts,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast & Marshall Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 7-21.

February 2 Ø Opening Your Eyes and Losing Your Self: Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, USA, 2001). … Readings: (1) Howard Hampton, “Clear Vanilla Skies: ‘Cryotainment’ and the Modern Science of Transcendence,” Film Comment 38/2, March-April 2002: 52-53. (2) William Earle, “Revolt Against Realism in the Films,” Film Theory, ed. Mast & Cohen, 32-42.

February 9 Ø Memory and the Question of Personal Identity: Memento (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2000). … Readings: (1) Rob Content, “Memento,” Film Quarterly 56/4 (2003): 36-41. (2) David Hume, “Of Personal Identity”, Philosophy: A New Introduction, ed. Douglas Mann & G. Elijah Dann (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2005), pp. 250-256. (3) Rosalind Sibielski, “Postmodern narrative or narrative of the postmodern? History, identity, and the failure of rationality as an ordering principle in Memento,” Literature and Psychology 49/4 (2004): 82-100. (4) Dion Tubrett, “’So Where are You?’ On Memento, Memory, and the Sincerity of Self-Deception,” Cineaction September 2001: 2-10.

February 16 Ø Mediated Violence & the Pixelation of Morality: Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, USA, 1994). … Readings: (1) Heidi Hochenedel, “Natural Born Killers: Beyond Good & Evil,” unpublished. (2) Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond God, Good, and Evil,” Philosophy: A New Introduction, ed. Douglas Mann & G. Elijah Dann (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2005), pp. 426-443.

March 2 Ø Situationism & Masculinity Redux: Fight Club (David Fincher, USA/Germany, 1999). … Readings:

(1) Amy Taubin, “So Good it Hurts,”Sight & Sound November 1999: 16-18. (2) Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, selections. (3) Gavin Smith, “Inside Out,” Film Comment 35/5, Sept-Oct 1999: 58-68. (4) Henry A. Giroux, “Brutalised Bodies and Emasculated Politics: Fight Club, Consumerism, and Masculine Violence,” Third Text 53 (2000-01): 31-41, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/FightClub

March 9 Ø Situationism & the Cinema as Bodhisattva: Waking Life (Richard Linklater, USA, 2001). … Readings: (1) Doug Mann, “Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking Up in Waking Life”, unpublished. (2) Carlo Cavagna, “Waking Life,” especially Part 3, “What it all Means”: http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/w/wakinglife-intro.htm. (3) Jim’s Web Page on Waking Life: http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gte484v/wakinglife.html

March 16 Ø Just Say No to Drugs: Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1991). … Readings: (1) Amy Taubin “The Wrong Body” and Michael O’Pray “Fatal Knowledge”, Sight and Sound March 1992: 8-11. (2) William Beard, “Insect Politics: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 23/3 (1996): 823-852.

March 23 Ø The Question of Cybernetic Personal Identity: AI: Artificial Intelligence (Stephen Spielberg, USA, 2001). … Readings: (1) J. Hoberman, “The Dreamlife of Androids,” Sight & Sound September 2001: 16-18. (2) Heidi Hochenedel, “Artificial Intelligence: A Quest for Humanity,” unpublished. (3) Tim Kreider, “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” Film Quarterly 56:2, 32-39.

March 30 Ø Life in a Simulacrum: The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, USA, 1999). … Readings: (1) Doug Mann & Heidi Hochenedel, “Evil Demons, Saviours, and Simulacra in The Matrix,” unpublished. (2) Read Mercer Schuchardt, “What is the Matrix?”, Taking the Read Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix,” ed. Glenn Yeffeth, BenBella Books 2003. Also at http://www.metaphilm.com/philms/matrix1.html

April 6 Ø Virtual Reality - “Better than Sex”: eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1999). … Readings: (1) David Lavery, “From Cinescape to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28.4 (2001): 150-157. (2) Heidi Hochenedel, “Understanding Simulacra and Simulation in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ,” unpublished.

Seminar Schedule

The seminars will alternate between groups A and B (the first date listed in each pair is for Group A, the second for Group B). Only one presentation on each film in each seminar unless I announce otherwise, first come, first served. I’ll assign all students to groups and topics after January 12 if you haven’t already chosen one. The first set of reviews will be graded more easily than the rest.

Date	Seminar Group	General Topic	Films Reviewed
January 28	Group A	The Quest	Excalibur and Run, Lola, Run
February 4	Group B	The Quest	Excalibur and Run, Lola, Run
February 11	Group A	Sex!	Crash and Eyes Wide Shut
February 18	Group B	More Sex!	Crash and Eyes Wide Shut
March 4	Group A	The Self	Vanilla Sky and Memento
March 11	Group B	The Self	Vanilla Sky and Memento
March 18	Group A	Violence (bang!)	Natural Born Killers and Fight Club
March 25	Group B	Violence (pow!)	Natural Born Killers and Fight Club
April 1	Group A	Fate & Free Will	Waking Life, Naked Lunch, AI (any 2)
April 8	Group B	Fate & Free Will	Waking Life, Naked Lunch, AI (any 2)

Notes on Research

As far as research goes, there is a vast reservoir of interesting material on the Internet (e.g. the great film data base at http://www.imdb.com), but much of it is useless trash. Unlike books and articles in scholarly journals and the more professional magazines (e.g. Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly), there’s little quality control on WWW writing. So I expect your essays to rely principally on books, journals, and film magazines, with at least 3 such sources in your final paper, which may include material from the courseware. You may, of course, supplement this with Web-based sources.

Class Attendance

All announcements having to do with quiz and exam structures and any changes in the course materials will be given during class. You’ll be tested in part on the lecture materials and class discussions (along with the readings AND films). It’s up to you to make sure you keep up to date on such things by attending class - there won’t be any notes posted on the web or extensive end-of-class review to help out systematic truants. Please don’t ask me for copies of class notes for missed classes - find a friend to partner up with to cover these classes. The same goes for borrowing my copies of the films shown in the course – if you miss a showing, try the arts film library in UC1, Blockbuster at Richmond and Oxford Streets, or FLIXX in Richmond Row. If not having access to web-posted notes or attending class regularly is a problem for you, please drop this course. Also, please keep the background chatter down during lectures and presentations out of respect for both me and for those of your classmates who wish to listen to the lecture or participate in class discussions.

E-Mails

I would like to conduct as much of class business as possible in person to avoid misunderstandings and the ever-worsening problem of e-mail congestion. Please don’t email me complex questions about the content of the course or how to structure and write an essay - it’s far more effective and pleasant for both of us if you come to speak to me in person about this sort of thing (you can e-mail me to make an appointment of course!). Also, I reserve the right to not reply to e-mail questions or complaints concerning grades or requests for extensions on assignments - once again, present these in person! The same standards of civility apply to electronic communication as apply to personal conversations or letters. If I receive a rude or impolite e-mail I will ignore it blacklist your e-mail address. In short, don’t rely on e-mail for any communication you think is important - e-mails are a poor replacement for direct verbal communication and can lead to serious misunderstandings and bad feelings.

Plagiarism and Prerequisites

Here’s the official word: “Plagiarism: Students must write their essays and assignments in their own words. Whenever students take an idea, or a passage from another author, they must acknowledge their debt both by using quotation marks where appropriate and by proper referencing such as footnotes or citations. Plagiarism is a major academic offence (see Scholastic Offence Policy in the Western Academic Calendar). The University of Western Ontario uses software for plagiarism checking. Students may be required to submit their written work in electronic form for plagiarism checking.” Here’s the unofficial word: don’t do it!

UWO Senate policy resolution: “Students are responsible for ensuring that their selection of courses is appropriate and accurately recorded and that all course prerequisites have been successfully completed, and that they are aware of any antirequisite course(s) that they have taken. If the student does not have the requisites for a course, the University reserves the right to remove the student from the course and to delete it from the student’s record. This decision may not be appealed. A student will receive no adjustment to his or her fees in the event that he or she is dropped from a course for failing to have the necessary prerequisites.”

This outline and other interesting stuff is available on line at: http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann.