A cross-field dialogue between Cultural Studies and Film Studies (with practical case studies)

Seminar by Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy & Juan Tarrancón de Francisco

Remark: This seminar will be organized twice. Both on 11/07 and 13/07.

Few products of contemporary visual culture can be said to have the social impact of narrative cinema. Based as this medium is on the production/construction of imaged stories aimed at attracting ever-wider and more heterogeneous audiences, it has, since its inception early in the 20th century, successfully adapted itself to changing times by constantly re-inventing its formulaic conventions and aesthetic devices to make visual sense of those social concerns affecting cinema-goers at any given moment. Even so, it seems that to this day no real consensus has yet been reached between film critics who tend to read the meaning of a film from the textuality of the film itself - with little or no reference to the social context, and (so-called) cultural studies' analyses that, more often than not, avail themselves a film (or a group of films) simply as "illustrations" of pre-established social, political and/or economic assumptions.

Taking as our cue Lawrence Grossberg's insistence that cultural studies should circumvent reductionism and simplification (2010, 7-55), the main purpose of this seminar is therefore to embrace the complexity of cinema (and, by extension, of the real world) by examining not only the social reasons why films matter but also, and importantly, the way films matter. This we propose to do by 1) briefly describing certain cases of biased, unconstructive analyses of films; 2) outlining how the on-going spilt between cultural studies and film studies can/could be bridged theoretically and intellectually, and 3) putting into practice the merging of differing knowledge competences through in-depth discussions and analyses of a number of film clips.

Grossberg, Lawrence, 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham &London: Duke University Press.