Prof. Stewart Donovan  sdonovan@stu.ca  EC307

Email:          sdonovan@stu.ca          

Phone:          452-0426

Office hours: Wednesday 1:00- 3:30   Thursday 1:00-3:30 or by appointment.

Course Requirements

Journal 30%:

A more informal style of writing, your journal entries should be on a weekly basis and must record notes from class, conversations with fellow students, family, friends et. al. about auteur cinema. The should be at least a page or two in length. They may be handwritten but I must be able to read them clearly. Students must also view at lest one auteur film a week besides the one they view in class. These films can be viewed on line, Netflicks, itunes or from a selection at the library. The journal/notebook should also record reading and research you are doing either at the library or on-line. There are two deadlines for this journal: for those seeking feedback on their writing, Thursday,  February 13th; the second deadline is the last day of class there is no penalty associated with the second deadline, but students will receive a letter grade only.

Class mark 10 % 

Paper 20%:

For your essay you must compare and contrast at least two films from class with two films of your own choosing. The paper should be between 6 and 10 typed double spaced pages. The paper is due on or before the final exam day.

Final Exam 40%:

This exam may be done as a take home to be passed in on the exam day or as an open book, in-class essay to be written during the designated exam time. Students will be asked to prepare two essays from a series of topics given out on the last day of class.

Lesson I     Orson Welles, Roberto Rosellini and the politics of auteurism.   

Lesson II   Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Goddard 

and Quentin Tarantino .  

Lesson III

Luis Bunuel Artist in Exile: Fantasy and Desire. Truth and Reason. Freud, Marx and the cinema's first intellectual. Gramsci, hegemony and the Spain of Franco. 

"Pleasure  falls out side the realm of knowledge, and is therefore dangerously anarchic".                                                                                             —Terry Eagleton, After Theory

Lesson IV  Luis Bunuel: Church and State

Lesson V

Ingmar Bergman: Pursuing the personal.

 Lesson VI

Ingmar Bergman in the wake of the novel: the claims of interiority. 

Lesson VII

Yasujuro Ozu: Domestic Cinema

Lesson VIII

Werner Herzog:  The Human Planet

Lesson IX

Werner Herzog  

Lesson X

Cronenberg and Todd Solondz: Truth to Power:  battling the Hollywood neo-cons and neo-liberals.

Lesson XI Europe Past and Present: Agnieszka Holland and Lars Von Trier. 

Lesson XII

 The World of Hayao Miyazaki