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This course asks how a ‘cinema of contagion’ might offer a lens through which we can better understand our precarious place in this world. It considers contagion in a literal sense, by exploring how a variety of international films from the 20th and 21st centuries represent illness, viral outbreaks, plagues, parasitic invasions, and social controls such as quarantine measures. It analyses how filmmakers use contagion metaphorically or allegorically, including as an aesthetic strategy. It also explores how questions of embodiment, subjectivity and mortality are explored through different genres and national cinemas.
Whakamahuki | DescriptionThis course asks how a ‘cinema of contagion’ might offer a challenging, surprising and sometimes uplifting lens through which we can better understand our precarious place in this world. Historically, plague narratives connected the way that disease threatens the individual with the collapse of broader social structures like law, family and community. More contemporary artistic accounts ask difficult questions about the scope and limits of human power and subjectivity. This course considers contagion in a literal sense, by exploring how varied films from around the world represent illness, viral outbreaks, parasitic invasions, plagues, quarantine measures, social control, and pandemics. It also analyses how filmmakers use contagion metaphorically or allegorically, including as an aesthetic strategy.To do this, we will approach the course’s twelve films as cultural texts and works of cinematic art. We will consider how contagion narratives engage with a wide variety of topics: colonisation, racism, identity, community, faith, family, politics, paranoia, technology, animal rights, anthropocentrism, sex and sexuality, social control, crime and punishment, death, and the contested notion of ‘the human’. Additionally, we will analyse how these issues are expressed through formal means, by considering how cinematic language, style, affect and spectatorship shape meaning. We will also explore how different genres and even national cinemas might offer divergent perspectives on questions of embodiment, subjectivity and mortality. Course readings will include classic essays on contagion and illness from writers such as Susan Sontag and Antonin Artaud, as well as works of film scholarship. Lectures will also feature historical and documentary footage, such as hygiene and social guidance films, including material from Aotearoa New Zealand.DeliveryThis course is delivered in a blended format to ensure accessibility and flexibility. You can participate fully in person, by distance, or a combination of the two. In person, you will attend screenings and lectures on campus. If you are off campus, you will need to watch the films yourself in time with the class schedule, and either engage with interactive livestreams of the lectures, or watch lecture recordings later. An additional casual Zoom session will be available for people regularly off campus. If we are prevented from delivering courses in person (e.g. because of national responses to COVID-19), lectures will be delivered in a partially flipped model through a combination of pre-prepared lecture material and Zoom sessions, along the same schedule. A summer course requires the same amount of work from you as a regular course, but in a very condensed timeframe, so plan your time wisely. Please ensure that you have the digital resources required to participate fully in the course. This includes adequate devices (e.g. a laptop), access to wifi, and the bandwidth and data needed to potentially stream films and lectures, or attend office hours by zoom, if necessary.
By the end of the course, you will be able to:1) analyse and problematise how contagion narratives in film explore issues relating to selfhood, subjectivity, embodiment, autonomy, and the relationships between individual, political and civic bodies;2) outline and appraise connections between diverse films and critical writing on illness and contagion;3) make arguments about how genres and cinematic modes engage with shared themes in different ways;4) evaluate and make arguments about how films express complex meaning through cinematic form and content; and5) apply skills in visual and critical analysis, film methodologies, and digital research practices to a range of cinematic texts in a variety of contexts.
This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:
Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award
Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.
Employable, innovative and enterprising
Students will develop key skills and attributes sought by employers that can be used in a range of applications.
Globally aware
Students will comprehend the influence of global conditions on their discipline and will be competent in engaging with global and multi-cultural contexts.
Any 15 points at 100 level from CINE, orany 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Weeks one and three will have screenings Monday – Wednesday afternoons and Lectures Tuesday – Thursday mornings. Weeks two, four and five will have screenings Monday and Tuesday afternoons, and lectures Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.
Erin Harrington and Erin Harrington
All assessment is submitted on Learn.
All theoretical and contextual readings will be available via Learn. You do not need to purchase a textbook. If you intend to access films off campus, please contact the course coordinator before the course begins for guidance on where to stream, rent or purchase films online.Films, in order of screening:Isle of Dogs (2018, US / Germany, animated comedy drama)It Follows (2014, US, horror)The Seventh Seal (1957, Sweden, drama)BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017, France, drama)The Andromeda Strain (1971, US, sci fi drama)The Host (2006, South Korea, comedy / horror / drama)Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, US, sci fi thriller)The Hunt (2012, Denmark, drama)The Thing (1982, US, sci fi / body horror)28 Days Later (2002, UK, post-apocalyptic horror)Ringu (1998, Japan, supernatural horror)Annihilation (2018, US / UK, sci fi drama / psychological horror)(Image: 'The Andromeda Strain' by x-ray delta one, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)
Domestic fee $777.00
International fee $3,375.00
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see Humanities .