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This course considers the creative, provocative ways that cinema might explore the limits and capacities of bodies, both real and imagined, and in doing so offer a lens through which we can better understand our precarious place in this world. It analyses how filmmakers explore contagion, transformation and hybridity as forms of metaphor and allegory, as well as aesthetic strategies. It also investigates how questions of embodiment, subjectivity, identity and mortality are explored through different genres and national cinemas.
Whakamahuki | Description From comedy to horror, science fiction to musicals, cinema is full of strange bodies. This course considers the creative, provocative ways that cinema might explore the limits and capacities of bodies, both real and imagined, and in doing so offer a lens through which we can better understand our precarious place in this world. We’ll consider transformation, contagion, and hybridity in a literal sense, by exploring how varied films from around the world represent bodies, metamorphosis, viral outbreaks, monsters, and alien incursions. We’ll see how filmmakers use these themes metaphorically or allegorically, including as an aesthetic strategy. This also involves thinking about cinema itself as a type of ‘strange body’ – one that’s flexible and surprising.To do this, we will approach the course’s varied twelve films as cultural texts and works of cinematic art. We’ll consider a variety of topics: colonisation, racism, humour, identity, community, faith, family, politics, paranoia, technology, animal rights, anthropocentrism, sex and sexuality, social control, crime and punishment, death, and the contested notion of ‘the human’. Additionally, we will analyse how these issues are expressed through formal means, by considering how cinematic language, style, affect and spectatorship shape meaning. We will also explore how different genres and even national cinemas might offer divergent perspectives on questions of embodiment and subjectivity. Course readings will marry academic work, film criticism, and popular responses to cinema and culture.This course has an emphasis upon in-person engagement, and is not appropriate for distance learning. Many of the films shown will not be able to be sourced by students offsite. Students are required to be present and contribute in person to fulfil workshop participation requirements, and lectures have a strong discussion component. Assessments are structured carefully to help you develop the skills you need to succeed in the course. ECHO recordings of lectures will be made available as study resources, but these are not a replacement for consistent in-person attendance.
By the end of the course, you will be able to:1) analyse and problematise how contagion narratives in film explore issues relating to selfhood, subjectivity, embodiment, autonomy, and the relationships between individual, political and civic bodies;2) outline and appraise connections between diverse films and critical writing on illness and contagion;3) make arguments about how genres and cinematic modes engage with shared themes in different ways;4) evaluate and make arguments about how films express complex meaning through cinematic form and content; and5) apply skills in visual and critical analysis, film methodologies, and digital research practices to a range of cinematic texts in a variety of contexts.
This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:
Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award
Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.
Employable, innovative and enterprising
Students will develop key skills and attributes sought by employers that can be used in a range of applications.
Globally aware
Students will comprehend the influence of global conditions on their discipline and will be competent in engaging with global and multi-cultural contexts.
Any 15 points at 100 level from CINE, orany 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Students must attend one activity from each section.
Erin Harrington
Films (subject to change):• Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Park and Box, 2005, UK)• The Lure (Smoczyńska, 2015, Poland)• Jennifer’s Body (Kusama, 2009, US)• The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957, Sweden)• The Andromeda Strain (Wise, 1971, USA)• 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002, UK)• The Host (Bong, 2006, South Korea)• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978, US)• The Thing (Carpenter, 1982, US)• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988, USA)• Annihilation (Garland, 2018, US / UK)• Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983, Canada)All theoretical and contextual readings will be available via Learn. You do not need to purchase a textbook. If you intend to access films off campus, please contact the course coordinator before the course begins for guidance on where to stream, rent or purchase films online.(Image: 'The Andromeda Strain' by x-ray delta one, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)
Domestic fee $894.00
International fee $4,100.00
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see Humanities .