We should avoid documentaries, for they do not allow for total control over what is shown and therefore might allow for the infiltration of undesirable elements: we need a studio cinema, like that of Hollywood, with well-decorated interiors inhabited by nice people. 7 Students on LLC MSc programmes get first priority to this course. If you are not on an LLC course, please let your administrator or the course administrator know you are interested in the course. Unauthorised enrolments will be removed.

Abel, Richard 1988. French Film: Theory and Criticism 1907–1939, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1The spectator] goes to see, to feel, to sympathize. He is taken for the time out of the limitations of his environment; he walks the streets of Paris; he rises with the cowboy of the West; he delves in the depths of the earth with swarthy miners, or tosses on the ocean with sailor or with fishermen. He feels, too, the thrill of human sympathy with some child of poverty or sorrow.… The motion picture artist may play on every pipe in the great organ of humanity. 3 Armstrong, Dan 1989. “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall). Stam, R. (2000) ¿Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation¿, in J. Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, 54-76. McFarlane, B. (1996) Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (co-authored with Ella Shohat) won the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in 1994. Stam's Subversive Pleasures; Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film was a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" in 1989 and Runner-Up for the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in the same year.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985). Reflexion on film as a medium began virtually with the medium itself. Indeed, the etymological meanings of the original names given to the cinema already point to diverse ways of envisioning the cinema and even foreshadow later theories. Biograph and animatographe emphasize the recording of life itself (a strong current, later, in the writings of Bazin and Kracauer). Vitascope and Bioscope emphasize the looking at life, and thus shift emphasis from recording life to the spectator and scopophilia (the desire to look), a concern of 1970s psychoanalytic theorists. Chronophotographe stresses the writing of time (and light) and thus anticipates Deleuze’s (Bergsonian) emphasis on the time image, while Kinetoscope, again anticipating Deleuze, stresses the visual observation of movement. Scenarograph emphasizes the recording of stories or scenes, calling attention both to decor and to the stories that take place within that decor, and thus implicitly privileges a narrative cinema. Cinematographe, and later cinema, call attention to the transcription of movement. Adorno, T. W. 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. Jeph. London: Verso.The concept of realism, while ultimately rooted in the classical Greek conception of mimesis (imitation), gained programmatic significance only in the nineteenth century, when it came to denote a movement in the figurative and narrative arts dedicated to the observation and accurate representation of the contemporary world. A neologism coined by French critics, realism was originally linked to an oppositional attitude toward romantic and neo-classical models in fiction and painting. The realist novels of writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Eça de Queiròs brought intensely individualized, seriously conceived characters into typical contemporary social situations. Underlying the realist impulse was an implicit teleology of social democratization favoring the artistic emergence of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic–existential representation (Auerbach, 1953, p. 491). Literary critics distinguished between this deep, democratizing realism, and a shallow, reductionistic, and obsessively veristic naturalism – realized most famously in the novels of Emile Zola – which modeled its human representations on the biological sciences. The question of cinematic specificity can be approached (a) technologically, in terms of the apparatus necessary to its production; (b) linguistically, in terms of film’s materials of expression; (c) historically, in terms of its origins (e.g. in daguerreotypes, dioramas, kinetoscopes); (d) institutionally, in terms of its processes of production (collaborative rather than individual, industrial rather than artisanal); and (e) in terms of its processes of reception (individual reader versus gregarious reception in movie theater). Whereas poets and novelists (usually) work alone, filmmakers (usually) collaborate with cinematographers, art directors, actors, technicians, etc. While novels have characters, films have characters and performers, a quite different thing. Thus Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet features one entity (the character Conchita) while the Buñuel adaptation of the novel That Obscure Object of Desire features three (or more) entities: the character, the two actresses who play the role, and the dubber who dubs both actresses. Leitch, Thomas (2007) Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press. Appadurai, Arjun 1990. “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring). With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies.

Barthes, R. (1988 (1968)) ¿The Death of the Author¿, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 167-72. Here the notion of photogenie, later developed by French filmmaker-theorists like Jean Epstein to advance the specific potentialities of the seventh art, becomes a normative epidermic notion of beauty, associated with youth, luxury, stars, and, at least implicitly, whiteness. Although the passage does not mention race, its call for clean and hygienic as opposed to dirty faces, and its generally servile stance toward the lily-white Hollywood model, suggest a coded reference to the subject. 6 At times, the racial reference becomes more explicit. One editorialist calls for Brazilian cinema to be an act of purification of our reality, emphasizing progress, modern engineering, and our beautiful white people. The same author warns against documentaries as more likely to include undesirable elements: Several film and media scholars have published books—some of them hefty—that collect significant writings from the history of cinema study. Stam and Miller 2000 and the several editions of Braudy and Cohen 2009 have found a large audience among students and scholars. Earlier, Nichols 1985 and Rosen 1986 collected crucial texts in the traditions of grand theory. Easthope 1993 has tried to pare down the large bibliography on theory to its essentials, while Gledhill and Williams 2000, Miller and Stam 1999, and Palmer 1989 have commissioned new essays that take a metacritical stance toward the material. The course takes an expanded approach to the question of adaptation, seeing film as not simply based on literary antecedents but as an art form which draws on other forms of art. It will consider movements across genres - from literary classics to comic books - and across historical periods and geographical spaces. Rothwell, K. S. (2004 (1999)) A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Adorno, T. W. and Max Horkheimer 1997. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Verso. Ray, R. B. (2000) ¿The Field of ¿Literature and Film¿¿, in J. Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, 38-53. Constandinides, Costas (2010) From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking the Transition of Popular Narratives. New York: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1986 (1969)) ¿What is an Author¿, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 101-20. Brazilian cinema, literature, and popular culture form another node in Stam's research. He co-edited Brazilian Cinema (1982) with Randal Johnson. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially of Afro-Brazilians, during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema.

Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the Postcolonial Atlantic (Routledge, 2012) coauthored with Ella Shohat Naremore, J. (1990) ¿Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism¿, Film Quarterly 44 (1), 14-22. Carroll, Rachel, ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum.think critically about the migration of stories and ideas across different historical, geographical and generic areas.