Undergraduate Courses (list)

To alter a famous phrase, is cinema a continuation of war by other means? This course will look at how film under global capitalism serves and is served by the waging of war—how the stories we tell ourselves about it powerfully shape and underlie myths about national identify and how we relate to difference. We will examine the war film genre itself (with particular emphasis on Hollywood) but also consider the impact of documentary and other forms of media on our understanding of the military, propaganda, antifascism, globalization, race and gender in war, science fiction, and ultimately how the perceptual and imaging technologies taken up by cinema move us from WWII to the Cold War to the post-9/11 “War on Terror” and beyond.