Cinema and history [LLETM303]

Learning outcomes

• Acquire the ability to analyse the film object (by applying scientific reasoning and critical thinking) • To place a film production in its production context, to interpret its formal procedures and to understand the creative process.

Objectives

This course aims to explore and question the relationship between cinema and history. These relations are close in view of the contiguity of the seventh art and the 20th century. Many events, political regimes, armed and/or ideological conflicts, and emancipation movements have manifested themselves on the big screen or have used the cinema to promote their causes. Through the powerful 'presence effect' of film language, film productions have clearly influenced and shaped events and their representations. Moreover, from the outset, cinema has been a place for representing the past, whether near or far, by means of reconstructions or archive images. In this sense, cinema is a particularly influential place of memory. Finally, documentary cinema and history can both be considered as "always problematic and incomplete reconstructions" of reality. The homology between cinema and history raises fascinating epistemological questions.

Content

In concrete terms, the 'film and history' course is currently structured around two main themes: - Cinema and totalitarianisms: the cinema is analysed as an ideological tool of authoritarian regimes or as a penetrating and critical look at them (produced a posteriori or not). - cinema and work: film production, which has developed over the course of the 20th century up to the present day, has been involved in the major reconfigurations of salaried activity and the relationship to work, to the point of questioning its drifts and dangers.