1 (taught by Lourdes Domingo)

1. VIDEO ART. From Nam June Paik to Bill Viola. Video art spans art, cinema, museum, and becomes mediation.

2. FASHION. The fashion film. Directors, actors, and brands. Events: space as a spectacle. The evanescence of the market: short videos, AI, and new formats.

3. DRAMATIC MECHANISMS IN THE AGE OF IMAGE-EXCESS. Fracture and fragmentation in a globalizing discourse: space and time.

4. OMNIPRESENT AND FUNCTIONAL IMAGE. Using and creating, participating and being absorbed. Creating meaning or immanence of experience on the social screen.

5. PHANTOM FIGURATION IN LIQUID SOCIETY. Figurative consistency in film, series, and advertising.

2 (taught by Andreu Arribas)

Being critical:

The aim of this second part of the course is to propose a journey through some theoretical and methodological lines that students can use to historicize and interpret contemporary audiovisual trends. To this end, tools are provided to facilitate students adopting new criteria for study and analysis to apply to their final work.

The course will start from Nietzsche's concept of "critical history" and its practical application to christology, art history, and the image before finally applying it in depth to cinema; specifically, to a decade, a genre, and a specific historiography.

Topic 1

The philosophy of history for the historicization of audiovisual trends

Nietzsche's concept of "critical history": the historical (monumental history and antiquarian history); the ahistorical and supra-historical (critical history). The application of Nietzsche's "critical history" to christology by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI: interpretation includes the historical component and the relationship of the past to the present. The application of Nietzsche's "critical history" to art history by Georges Didi-Huberman: Panofsky reads Kant (the document), Didi-Huberman reads Freud (the symptom); the reconfiguration of the past in the image (anachronism).

Viewing excerpts from American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), and They Died with Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh, 1941) and interpreting each of them from the others' perspectives.

Topic 2

Visual motifs as a critical tool for reading cinema

Visual memory. Forms of argument. Viewer recognition. Scenes with temporality. Before the tomb: exploring Ford's cinema from the motif of the tomb (from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949] to The Searchers [1956] via Straight Shooting [1917], Judge Priest [1934], and Young Mr. Lincoln [1939]) via Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus), the Christian pictorial tradition of Noli me tangere, Novalis and eighteenth-century romantic literature, Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958), Mankiewicz (The Barefoot Contessa, 1954), Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), Eastwood (Unforgiven, 1992), and Tarantino (Kill Bill Vol. 2, 2004).

Topic 3

From the crisis of image-action to image-energy: the critical rereading of 1970s American cinema by Jean-Baptiste Thoret

Deleuze's image-movement. Two theses of Bergson's movement. The image-perception, the image-affect, and the image-action. The crisis of image-action. Jean-Baptiste Thoret's image-energy in his critical rereading of 1970s American cinema: shaving of classical cinema and aesthetic, historical, and political necessity to show violence. Viewing excerpts from The Big Shave (Scorsese, 1967), Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Graduate (Nichols, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969), Woodstock (Wadleigh, 1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973), Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), and We Blew It (Thoret, 2017).

Topic 4

The tragic hero, the philosophy of limits, and the survival of the image in the critical rereading of the western by Fran Benavente

The application of Nietzsche's "critical history" to a film genre. Cinematic lineage vs modernity (Histoire(s) du cinéma). Legacy transmission (Deadwood). The returning body (Once Upon a Time in the West, Kill Bill Vol. I and II). The tragic hero (Shane, My Darling Clementine). Explosiveness, temporality, and shrouding of the genre (The Wild Bunch; For a Few Dollars More; The Shooting, Ride the Whirlwind). The hero's recovery from the grave (Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider). The ashes of the genre (Dead Man).

Topic 5

The myth of the wounded American subject

The application of Nietzsche's "critical history" to the history of American cinema. Acknowledgment of a wound (The Searchers). Fractured myths (A History of Violence). The solicitation of the mnemonic image (True Detective III, Zero Dark Thirty, Paris, Texas). Genealogy of the wound (The Last of the Mohicans, The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, They Died With Their Boots on, Fort Apache, Heaven’s Gate, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Confrontation with horror as division (The Searchers, The Deer Hunter, Heat, True Detective). Contemporary fractures (Sicario, Wind River). Acknowledgment of the wound's non-closure (Mississippi Burning, BlacKkKlansman) or proposal of closure (Major Dundee, News of the World).