FILM 42.23 Travelers, Tourists, and Sojourners: Mobility in the Movies
In this class, we study film as an aesthetic and political medium. Referring to works on cinematic space and spectatorship theory, we explore how directors construct and deconstruct spaces, nations, and borders in their audience’s imagination. We analyze cinema spectatorship as a travel experience and investigate how geopolitical depictions rely on narratives, images, and imaginations. We study travelling as the possibility for transnational encounters of disparate groups of people and not only assess who is crossing international borders – seafarers, colonizers, immigrants, refugees, commuters, or tourists – but also examine who is welcome to cross, who is welcome to stay, who is expelled and who might have to die, according to genre conventions in global cinema. In road movies, westerns, and recent migration and tourist films, we will focus on themes of pleasure, coming-of-age, and self-fulfillment, as well as conflict, power differentials, (neo-)colonialism, and displacement. In our comparison of European and American films, we will explore similarities and differences in debates surrounding mobility, national identity, indigeneity, film-induced tourism, and human rights.
Cross Listed Courses
COLT 57.13