The Theatricality of film: course description
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Jörg Dünne, Ludwig Maximilians Universität
The intermedial relationship between theatre and film can be considered in different ways. The course will not deal so much with filmic adaptations of stage plays or "filmed theatre" as with the theatricality inherent in film making and film viewing. This approach is grounded on a notion of intermediality, in which theatrical narration and performance are considered powerful forms of the film medium’s full historical development. Film history can thus be understood as an extension, as well as as a transformation by technical means, of theatricality, therefore making film, according to the French critic André Bazin, the true source of a new theatrical aesthetic in the 20th century. Beginning with French cinema of the 1930s, especially that of Jean Renoir (La règle du jeu, 1939), and continuing with a Hollywood production (Ernst Lubitsch’s To be or not not be, 1942), the films of Italian post-war cinema (e.g. Federico Fellini’s La strada, 1954), the French Nouvelle Vague (e.g. Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient, 1960), and the cinema of Northern Europe (Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966), the course will attempt to trace the development of theatrical aspects of film aesthetics from the early sound movie up until its recent rediscovery in the work of contemporary filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999) and Lars von Trier (Dogville, 2003).
