The January term will run from January 3-20 2023.
Registration for January 2023 courses opens on Monday, October 17, 2022. No departmental clearance is required to register.
Close Analysis of Film:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the New Hollywood (and “newer” Hollywood) of the 1970s
Dana Polan
Mondays-Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
721 Broadway, Room 670
CINE-UT 290 / class # 1202
Film historians tend to argue that in Hollywood cinema there’s a transition around 1975 to 1977 from films early in the decade that often concentrate on alienated anti-heroes (men generally) restlessly on the go, perhaps looking for some meaning but not finding it, to later works that are less cynical, less downbeat, and less critical and are granted blockbuster success. From a cinema of negativity to a cinema of upbeat optimism, from films grounded in oppressive everyday realities of life to the dazzle of inspiring special effects that promise transcendence of life’s cares. Concentrating on a smash hit in this moment of transition, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this course interrogates 70s film history to test the accuracy of the transition-narrative. Spielberg’s film plays on the awe of vibrant visual effects, for both characters in the narrative and we the spectators outside the film, to imagine a new universe of spiritual possibility. On the other hand, it shares with earlier films of the 1970s an emphasis on a male anti-hero who is lost and searching and can find his way at the cost of turning his back on humankind. The course offers a close study of Spielberg’s film but also engages with the director’s career overall in the period (from Jaws to E.T., say); with the diverse qualities of 70s cinema overall (between cynicism and uplift), with the business of Hollywood in the period (franchises, commodity tie-ins, and so on), with content issues of gender and social norms (for example, whiteness as an ideological default mode for much of dominant cinema in the period), to investigate the complex nature of American entertainment cinema in a key moment of its history.