WEEK 3 FILMS

Yesterday's conversation generated a number of very helpful concepts that I would like you all to consider as we move forward through the remaining weeks of class. 

• Irony: to what extent does metacinema imply a position of irony on the part of the filmmaker? What forms of irony are at work in these films? Is irony inherent to metacinema?
• Truth: in what ways is cinema a "search for truth?" What is truth and how does cinema hope to portray said truth? In what ways is cinema entangled in the messy notions of true and false?
• Thought: how does self-referentiality relate to thinking?  
• The Camera as Accomplice: in what ways does the camera become an active agent in the development of narrative and/or when the camera is not explicitly implicated, how are we as viewers accomplices simply in the act of looking? How is vision an accomplice to violence?
• Creating vs. Recording: how can we evaluate the differences between these two acts? And what occupies the grey area? 
• Empathy

As mentioned at the end of our conversation yesterday, please re-visit/re-read the first chapter of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. Chapter 1 is "Separation Perfected." We'll start our conversation on Sunday with a discussion of that reading and this week's reading Jean Baudrillard's "Simulation & Simulacra." Please begin by reading the first 15 pages of that book (posted on D2L) and I will let you know if you need to read any more than that.  

For this week we'll be watching:

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One - William Greaves - 1968
(WATCH ON HULU)

AND


I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) - Vilgot Sjöman - 1967
(Watch on Hulu)