FYS 16 German Film: Modernity and its Monsters
This course offers a survey of German film from the origins of cinema to the present day. We will focus on questions pertaining to how one can interpret or "read" a film, as well as the relation of German film to contemporaneous developments in art, literature and politics. How is the authoritarianism of the early 20th century depicted and/or confronted in film? What do horror films tell us about the anxieties and prejudices of the societies that produced and consumed them? Throughout the course, we will investigate the ways in which the dilemmas and aspirations of the modern world became legible in film, and continually ask to what extent film is a medium uniquely suited for depicting and attempting to understand modernity's paradoxes. Open only to first year frosh.