The Cinema of Contagion

Description

Whakamahuki | Description

This 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. Recent events have thrust this topic to the forefront of our imaginations. 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 varied 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 marry academic work, film criticism, and popular responses to cinema, culture, and contagion.

This course has an emphasis upon in-person engagement, and is not designed to be taken by distance. Many of the twelve films shown in our screening sessions will not be able to be sourced by students offsite. Students are required to be present and contribute in person to fulfil post-screening workshop participation requirements, and lectures have a strong discussion component. Assessments are structured carefully to help you develop the skills you need to succeed in the course. ECHO recordings of lectures will be made available as study resources, but these are not a replacement for consistent in-person attendance.