|
SURREALISM AND SEXUALITY IN THE CINEMA:
BUNUEL, HITCHCOCK, DAVID LYNCH
MA527 TWO WEEK INTENSIVE WINTER RECESS
Professor Dennis Broe JAN 3-13 6-10 PM
Graduate Course open to upper level undergraduates.
This class explores the ways first fine artists and then filmmakers employed Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as the seat of sexual and aggressive impulses to fuel their art. The works often caused a sensation and were also part of an overall platform that attacked and outraged polite society and bourgeois taste and sensibility. We will view the works of artists such as Dali, Magritte, Yves-Tanguey and DeChirico. Midterm is due a week after class ends. The final, due a month after class ends, can be either a paper or a surrealist work in your aesthetic discipline.
In film we will concentrate mainly on the Spanish and Mexican films of Luis Bunuel, beginning with his early works with Dali The Golden Age, The Andalusian Dog and an early documentary about Spanish poverty Land Without Bread Then we will look at his Mexican films including Los Olvidados, a surreal look at a gang of street kids and the society that impoverishes them, Susana, a truly subversive film about a woman escaped from prison who brings an entire hacienda to its knees, and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz about the misdeeds of a man cursed with knowing the future. Then we will look at Bunuels’ career as an international director in which he continued to amaze his audience and infuriate authority in such films as the Academy Award winner Viridiana which got him immediately re-exiled from Franco’s Spain and Diary of a Chambermaid, which explores all forms of bourgeoisie perversity as it centers around the French maid.
We next look briefly at Hitchcock as an artist also very much under the sway of the unconscious in Murder and Marnie and we conclude with three works from the current master of the bizarre, of the strange, in short, of the surreal, David Lynch: Blue Velvet, the television series Twin Peaks and his last film for which he was nominated for an Academy Award Mulholland Drive. Papers exploring his current film Inland Empire are welcome.
|
