Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: GERMAN FILM (IN ENGLISH)

Department: Modrn & Classicl Lit & Culture

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Distribution Group: Distribution Group I

Credit Hours: 3

Description: The course explores filmic representations of communities, their complex mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, their inevitable dynamics of otherness, as well as practices of modern states toward communal regulation and control. While communities biologically denote the interaction of organisms sharing an environment, we will examine the practices of power that states wield toward the maximization of “life.” Hence the questions of biopower, health politics, eugenics, sexism, racism, and genocide. How do films negotiate the precarious politics of communal life, what are their strategies for resistance, and what their moments of complicity? We will explore how film reflects communal life in twentieth-century German history, but also, and perhaps primarily, how film responds to that history by generating its own speaking power and mobilizing its own political force. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for GERM 335 if student has credit for FSEM 136/GERM 136.