Roger Hallas's Recent Courses

Undergraduate Courses

ETS 145: Reading Popular Culture

Popular culture has long been a target of criticism, frequently considered trivial, manipulative, vulgar and simplistic. This course however takes it seriously. Maintaining a focus on visual culture, we will critically examine a range of cultural objects, including cinema, television, popular music, advertising and computer games. We will address fundamental questions concerning popular culture: What kinds of meanings does it produce and how do they shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us? How do different people use popular culture to gain agency or to resist forms of oppression or control? In the second half of the semester, we will concentrate on how popular culture engages with the category of “the real,” a concept which animates much contemporary cultural debate. The course concludes with a group project on popular animation, a rich area of contemporary popular culture that offers us the opportunity to examine the intersection of the various themes and issues discussed in the course, including gender, sexuality, race, class and globalization.

ETS 241: Reading and Interpretation II : Film and Culture

This course will examine film from a number of different perspectives, seeking to understand how cinema—as a form, an apparatus, an industry, and a social institution—interacts with culture and processes of cultural change. The course will focus primarily on US culture and Hollywood film; and it will be asking, in essence, which factors have historically shaped the interaction between movies and culture. Hollywood has long occupied a central place in US culture. Constantly evolving yet seemingly timeless, movies and our relationships with them play an important, complex role—visually, emotionally, economically, politically, and ideologically—in our social consciousness. As a means of investigating that role, the course will begin by exploring how filmic language and style, Hollywood genres and narrative structure generate the coordinates of our movie-going experience. In the second part of the course we will move beyond the parameters of the film text itself to consider the complex role that different film audiences play in cinema's production of meaning. Thus we will consider issues of race, gender and sexuality not just in terms of their representation on screen, but also in relation to how these aspects of cultural difference shape the very act of film spectatorship itself. The course concludes with a special focus on the issues around cinema and violence. While the representation of violence has played a significant role in cinema throughout its history, it has recently become one of the most significant issues framing how we think and talk about the relationship between film and culture. While no prior experience in film studies is needed, students are expected to have some familiarity with the key terms of critical theory.

ETS 342: Introduction to Semiotic Theories of Representation: The Media of Witnessing

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has commented that, “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.” The testimonial act of bearing witness to traumatic experience has indeed become a privileged and omnipresent mode of communication over the last century in both literary and visual media. But why? While the past hundred years have produced an incredible global proliferation of media technologies (especially image based ones), the same period also incorporates an international catalog of historical events which have pushed the very limits of these representational technologies: the Holocaust, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the AIDS pandemic and, more recently, September 11. This course investigates what is at stake when a cultural text bears witness to such historical trauma. We shall examine the semiotics of witnessing through the analysis of a wide variety of textual forms, including film, video, television, photography, graphic art, memorials, autobiography, memoirs and poetry. A number of fundamental questions shall guide us through this investigation: What function should representation serve in the face of unbearable trauma and loss? How does the global circulation of such witnessing texts shape the meanings they may produce? To what degree can an individual story represent a collective history? What forms of knowledge count in producing the “truth” of an historical event? Studying the act of bearing witness affords us the opportunity to interrogate some of the most important conceptual categories within critical theory today: representation, history, memory, trauma, the body, the real, knowledge and truth.

ETS 343: Introduction to Cultural Theories of Representation
Contemporary British Cinema

Despite the popular representation of Britishness as a blundering, class-ridden and anachronistic national identity (quintessentially embodied in the figure of Austin Powers), contemporary British art, fashion, architecture and cinema have all recently garnered much international critical acclaim. These exciting developments in British culture emerge from over two decades of profound social, political and economic change in the United Kingdom, including the radical reorganization of its economy and social policy, the postcolonial reconfiguration of its national identity and its often ambivalent relation to the project of European integration. This course investigates the exceptionally rich cinema to emerge from these transformations during the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. A small national film industry struggling against Hollywood's global hegemony, British cinema of the past twenty five years has continued to produce an aesthetically challenging and thematically rigorous body of films. Heritage films, such as the numerous E. M. Forster and Jane Austin adaptations, perform complex negotiations of the nostalgia for Britain's colonial past, whereas films by directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh draw from particular tendencies within British theater and social documentary in order to examine the social crises of the present. It is also during this period that an independent Black British cinema emerges, bringing together Caribbean and South Asian diaspora in the pursuit of a collective black cultural politics. The nexus that structures the course — cinema and nation — shall be explored through a number of different inquiries: How does British cinema figure contemporary dynamics of class, race, gender and sexuality within the frame of the nation? How may specific film practices sustain, challenge or reconfigure dominant conceptions of nationhood? What function does a largely state-subsidized cinema play in domestic and global cultural economies that are dominated by U.S. popular culture?

ETS 343: Introduction to Cultural Theories of Representation
Cinema and the Documentary Idea

Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity's epistemological demand for empiricism and rational, scientific evidence. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for documenting the world, for capturing the “real.” This course investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film and video practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, fictional narrative cinema, essay films, autoethnographies, fake documentaries and docudrama. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the modernist estrangement of the world in Soviet and 1960s political cinema to the inflammatory provocations of Surrealist and (more recently) Dogme95 filmmakers, the course explores the relations between film and video practices from (often radically) different national, historical and political contexts.

ETS 343: Introduction to Cultural Theories of Representation: World Cinema

Cinema has often been called a universal language and it is certainly made all over the globe. But world cinema has a richness and complexity that defies a single model, despite the cultural ubiquity and economic power of Hollywood cinema. This course examines how the history of world cinema is imbricated in the historical processes of modernity, postmodernity, colonialism and globalization. In the first part of the course, we will consider the development of cinema within the context of nineteenth century visual culture, tracing how it contributed to the conceptualization of the modern world as visual spectacle. Subsequently, we will explore the diverse pleasures and politics of cinema from around the world, including Bollywood, Hong Kong action films, Third World and diasporic cinema, European art cinema, as well as special film technologies such as IMAX. Our critical interrogation of Hollywood cinema will address it within the global framework of the debate on cultural imperialism: does Hollywood cinema generate a global Americanized monoculture or have other cultures been able to appropriate its forms and pleasures in ways that hybridize and indigenize it. We will thus investigate how cinema contributes to our understandings of the world, our places within it, and our relations to other parts of it. In sum, we will discover how world cinema is always both local and global. Prior experience of film studies will be useful, but not essential, for students in this course. Students are required to attend the all film screenings.

ETS 352: Introduction to the Theory of Forms: Film Form / Film Theory

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the formal analysis of film texts and to the principal concerns of contemporary film theory. The first part of the course provides training in the critical analysis of film form, including editing, cinematography, mise-en-scène, sound and narration. In the second part of the course we investigate significant areas of contemporary film theory, including genre, authorship, the cinematic apparatus, feminist film theory, postcolonial film theory, queer theory, reception studies and postmodernism. While the course focuses on fictional narrative filmmaking, we shall also contextualize this dominant mode of cinema in relation to both experimental and documentary filmmaking. Weekly screenings include a wide range of international cinema, both classic and contemporary. No previous experience in film studies required.

ETS 382: Introduction to Imperialism and Nationalism: National, Imperial and Postcolonial Cinema

Over its one hundred year history cinema has played a significant role in the mediation of national and imperial ideologies. Through their complementary pleasures of narrative identification and visual spectacle, movies have provided the fantasies, mythologies and desires of nation and empire with an enormously popular medium. However, anti-imperial and postcolonial movements have also recognized a revolutionary potential in this quintessentially modern medium and have thus harnessed filmmaking as an important tool in their own political and cultural struggles. This course explores the complex relationship between cinema, nation, empire and postcoloniality through a focus on the cinemas of Britain, West Africa and India. We shall examine a wide historical range of filmmaking practices, from imperial adventure films to postcolonial allegories, from ethnographic film to experimental video. Since national imaginaries, both imperial or postcolonial, are constructed around various categories of difference, we shall also pay close attention to the issues of gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity. This course combines sustained attention to the specific economic, political, cultural and aesthetic histories that have shaped British, West African and Indian cinemas with an ongoing consideration of some key theoretical issues in the study of nationalism and postcoloniality, including modernity, heritage, multiculturalism, diaspora, sectarianism, hybridity and globalization.

Graduate Courses

ENG 700: Film Theory

This seminar provides an advanced introduction to the field of film theory. The seminar involves three broad sections: (1) “classical” film theory and its focus on the question of defining the film medium and its specificity; (2) the “grand” theory of the 1970s when film studies worked to establish its own disciplinary autonomy through its appropriation of semiotics and psychoanalysis; (3) the historicizing and de-essentializing turn of film theory which both situates film within the larger frames of modern/postmodern culture and emphasizes questions of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality and globalization. Although we will read the texts of film theory in broadly chronological order, the seminar resists a teleological approach (i.e. one that generates a progressive model of “theoretical obsolescence”). While theories will be historicized within the intellectual and cinematic contexts from which they emerged, they will also be put into conversation with each other throughout the whole course. Weekly film screenings will provide opportunities to illuminate key concepts, generate discussion and enable careful textual analysis. The aim of this seminar is to provide you a firm grounding in the changing issues within film theory, to immerse you in classical and contemporary scholarly writings on film, and to allow you to develop a critical vocabulary for visual analysis.

ENG 826: Advanced Seminar in Critical Theory: Cinema and the Documentary Idea

  Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity's epistemological demand for empiricism and rational, scientific evidence. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for documenting the world, for capturing the “real.” This seminar investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film and video practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, fictional narrative cinema, essay films, autoethnographies, mockumentaries and docudrama. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the modernist estrangement of the world in Soviet and 1960s political cinema to the inflammatory provocations of Surrealist and (more recently) Dogme95 filmmakers, the course explores the relations between film and video practices from (often radically) different national, historical and political contexts.