CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE ARTS II - MODULE II (CINEMA)

Description

The role of cinema in our society is a complex one starting with the factor of entertainment as popular expression. On a deeper analysis, cinema represents the expression of social mores, collective anxieties and cultural paradigms. The course has four principal objectives: - Provide the students with a comprehensive understanding of how cinema works both technically and culturally. - Help the student develop a personal understanding of major social theories as well as the capacity for expressing and analyzing cinematic narrative and how it contributes to the audience's experience. - Teach structural, cultural, semiotic and linguistic theories which help the student identify significant social-cultural themes within cinematic narrative. - Encourage students to understand the field of cinema production and its role in changing public opinion. This course offers the student a complex understanding of cinema, its structure and its meaning. Analysis of the cinematic language through semiotic analysis and its relation to social theories and consumer culture. Theoretical basis of the cultural questions represented through cinema and their relationship to social and individual psychological needs. How story structure guides our emotional response and therefore how structuring a story can lead to changing perception in the viewer. The vision of key films, scene alaysis or streaming episodes in order to understand their lingustic development and social significance as well as their productive complexities, such as direction, cinematography, acting, production and mis-en-scene. The course is based on the vision and subsequent in-class or on-line discussion of specific films, clips or streaming episodes which have attracted the public's attention for various motives. Semiotic analysis and a deeper understanding of social theories offer the student methods for understanding stylistic and narrative elements of a film. The technical choices in pre-production, production and post-production will be discussed in order to render the student capable of visualy analysing scenes, understand underlying story structure and character development, evaluate the commercial and emotional value of a script and have a basic awareness of production. Exchange/course-load context: The official incoming exchange catalogue states that 30xxx codes refer to undergraduate courses, 20xxx and 21xxx codes refer to graduate courses, and 50xxx codes refer to the Integrated Master of Arts in Law. Undergraduate exchange students are allowed to select undergraduate-level courses only; graduate students can choose both undergraduate and graduate level courses. Bocconi credits are ECTS-equivalent. Each Bocconi credit corresponds to 25 hours of workload, including 8 lecture hours.