ENH2520

Film and ideology

C Worth

8 points
* 4 hours per week
* Second semester
* Caulfield
* Prerequisites: ENH1100 and ENH1110 or approved equivalents.

Objectives Students completing this subject should have understood some of the ways in which film texts relate to society through the mediation of ideology. They should have learnt to apply such concepts as overt and covert ideology, cinematic representation, subject positions and reading frames to films. They should have explored ways in which realism as a mode of film-making is constructed stylistically and can be deployed, read, and challenged ideologically. And they should have acquired the critical and expressive resources to write independently on film, present effective accounts of ideology at work, and apply the material of the subject to their whole engagement with film.

Synopsis This subject introduces students to the contemporary study of film in relation to society, stressing the ways in which cinematic representation and ideology interact. It looks at three groups of films. One group is concerned explicitly with employment, unionism and strikes, an issue about which people take both overt and covert ideological positions (among the films that might be considered here are I'm Alright, Jack, On the Waterfront, The Angry Silence and Strikebound). The second group is concerned with the development of film realism in the representation of shifting social relations, in particular in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s - how is realism constructed on film, and how does it construct subject positions? (Films here might include Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, A Kind of Loving, The Servant.) The third group of films gives an opportunity for students to apply the theories developed earlier to examples of cinema's fascinated relationship with crime and recognise the constructedness of their own reading frames (films might include Public Enemy, Dirty Harry, Pulp Fiction). Films for the subject will be shown in class time.

Assessment Essay (2500 words): 40%
* Test (2 hours): 30%
* Class participation and exercises (equivalent to 1500 words): 30%

Prescribed texts

Bordwell D and Thompson K Film art McGraw-Hill

Recommended texts

Bordwell D Narration in the fiction film Methuen
Eagleton T Ideology: An introduction Verso
Nichols B Ideology and the image Indiana U P