This course is an introduction to intellectually stimulating cinematic works, discourses, and cultures of the post-Second World War period. With the recognition that Hollywood, like the United States of America, dominates postwar global interactions, we will focus instead on the film works of four major Asian and European directors—Vittorio De Sica (Italy), Akira Kurosawa (Japan), Satyajit Ray (India), and Michael Haneke (Austria)—who together represent a noteworthy range of cinematic poetics and politics. Topics to be explored include aesthetic issues such as images, sounds, narratives, spectatorship, and technology; and ideological issues such as modernity and modernization, capitalist commodification of everyday life, kinship, sexuality, femininity, childhood, postcolonial livelihoods, sickness, and death. As well, we will feature theoretical and philosophical discussions pertaining to film as perhaps the most powerful mode of mass communication in the twentieth century and beyond, with major effects on subsequent forms of visual and sonic media.
