Professor Nicholas Rombes
Briggs 231
313.993.1085
rombesnd@udmercy.edu
Readings
Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan.
I Shot Andy Warhol. Grove Press, 1996
John Hill. Film
Studies: Critical Approaches. Oxford, 2000.
Denis Johnson. Jesus'
Son. Harper Perennial, 1992.
David Lynch and Barry Gifford.
Lost
Highway. Faber and Faber, 1997.
Jonathan Rosenbaum. Dead
Man. British Film Institute, 2000.
Nick Rombes. Restoration,
American Style. Event-Scene
#90 in CTHEORY.
Recently, however, a new cinema has emerged into the American scene, a cinema characterized by jagged, elliptical editing, rapid-fire, hyperrealistic jump cuts across time and space, aggressively active (often hand-held) camera movement, and dense, intertextual references to cinema itself. This is the film world ofFight Club, Requiem for a Dream, Being John Malkovitch, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Run Lola Run.
This course contextualizes this new radical cinema by tracing its roots back to earlier experimental, avant-garde film from the Soviet silent era, the Italian neo-realist era, and the French New Wave era.
In English 375 we will pay homage to the avant-garde forerunners of the New Radical Cinema of today, with our suspicious eyes always alert to the complex ways in which film can both reinscribe and challenge the dominant ideologies of our post-punk American culture.
