Courses Taught at Reed

LIT 309: Introduction to Film Theory

The course introduces students to the main ideas and debates on film theory and criticism, from the early days of silent film to the most recent approaches to digital cinema. The discussion ranges across film schools in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. We study movements such as realism, formalism, apparatus theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, auteurism, genre theory, theories of spectatorship, Third World cinema, and postcolonial cinema. In addition to these theoretical approaches, students become familiar with cinematic language, including mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound.

The course explores the work of directors such as Edwin Porter, Sergei M. Eisenstein, F. W. Murneau, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio De Sica, Jean-Luc Godard, Ousmane Sembene, Wong Kar-Wai, among many others.

LITS/SPAN 372: Documentary Resistance in Spain and Latin America

What makes a documentary a form of resistance? The course focuses on documentary films from Latin America and Spain that represent struggles for social justice and function as a cultural form of protest and resistance. By discussing an array of contemporary films in their historical and political contexts, students examine the strategies, genres, and techniques that filmmakers use to address and participate in social change. The course addresses urban activism and the indignados movement in Spain, the piqueteros movement of Argentina, the Bolivian water war, Mayan women’s resistance to mining exploitation in Guatemala, the Huichol’s fight against multinational mining companies in Mexico, and Chile’s student uprisings in 2019. We watch and discuss films by Alejandro Naranjo (Colombia), Pamela Yates (Guatemala), Mario Handler (Uruguay), Hernán Vilchez (Mexico), Xapo Ortega and Xavier Artigas (Spain), among others.

SPAN 367: Law and Violence in Contemporary Peninsular Cinema

The course focuses on cinematic representations of law and violence in the context of contemporary Spain. We study how films present particular ethical or legal problems (i.e., gender violence, terrorism, capital punishment, torture, racism), the diverse views on law and justice they provide, and the judgments they invite viewers to make. 

Students learn to identify the assumptions that make them experience some kinds of violence as “normal” or “justified” while perceiving others as “excessive” or “illegitimate.” We also try to understand what makes us empathize with the suffering of a victim of violence or with the actions of a perpetrator, noting in particular the cinematic mechanisms and devices that facilitate the judgment that certain kinds of violence may be “merited” or “deserved.” In other words, the course encourages students to reflect critically upon how film mediates their own affective responses to the representation of violence.  

We watch and discuss films by Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Juan Antonio Bardem, Pilar Miró, Montxo Armendáriz, Pedro Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, Icíar Bollaín, Enrique Urbizu, Alberto Rodríguez, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Amenábar. The analysis of films is complemented by readings on legal and political theory, film studies, and philosophy (including the works of Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Butler, Sontag, Young, Scarry, Shapiro, and Derrida).

SPAN 376: Cinema and Human Rights

This class is an opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the concept of human rights through an analysis of films (either fictional or documentary). It explores the notion that human rights films are a powerful tool for raising awareness of human rights violations and for inducing spectators to take political action, as underlined in the Charter of the Human Rights Film Network, established in 2004 to promote human rights film festivals around the world. Through the lens of selected contemporary human rights films, the seminar explores questions such as: What forms of awareness do human rights films raise? What ethical dilemmas do filmmakers face in representing human violence and suffering? How truth can be defined in Human Rights Cinema? How can film help us to establish it? How do the narrative and aesthetic choices of filmmakers shape the judgments of spectators? 

The course offers a comparative analysis of a variety of historical cases (Germany, South Africa, Algeria, Chile, Argentina, Perú, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Spain) and draws students into the complexity of ways of engaging these events, via films, academic literature, human rights reports, testimonials of victims, memorial museums and monuments, and photography. Films discussed in class include: Judgment at Nuremberg (Kramer, 1961), The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966), La jaula de oro (Quemada-Díez, 2013), El norte (Nava, 1983), Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Portillo, 1985), El botón de nácar (Guzmán, 2015), Long Night's Journey into Day (Hoffman &Reid, 2000), and The Salt of the Earth (Salgado & Wenders, 2014). 

LITS/SPAN 371: Sensing Justice: Cinema and the Politics of the Senses

The course explores the narrative, visual, and aural frames and also the sensory perceptions and affects that mediate the various dimensions of justice (procedural, retributive, and distributive). Whether and how we make ethical, political, and legal judgments and whether and how we legitimize the institutions charged with administering justice depends upon these frames and perceptions. The main goal of this course is to identify and examine how these various “sensory frames” help to mediate justice.  What senses do these frames privilege (or ignore)? What subjects do they show and construct? How do they make us feel, see, touch, taste, and smell in certain ways rather than others? The course explores these questions through contemporary Spanish cinema and readings on legal theory, film theory, and politics (including works by Deleuze, Rancière, Manderson, Philippopoulus-Mihalopoulos, Marks, Elsaesser, Sobchack, Chion, and Doane).

SPAN 311: Advanced Language and Culture: Spanish Cinema

This course provides a historical and critical overview of Spanish cinema from the early 1950s to the present. By analyzing films in their cultural context, along with selected critical texts, the course explores questions such as censorship and ideology; war, reconciliation, and democracy; representations of gender and sexuality; immigration and exile; globalization; climate change; and others. We watch and discuss films by Luis García Berlanga, Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar, Icíar Bollaín, Fernando León de Aranoa, Chus Gutiérrez, and Almudena Carracedo. 

SPAN 321 Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literature

This course is designed to give students a theoretical, historical, and cultural framework for the more advanced study of Spanish and Spanish American literature. It will include considerations of genre, reception, and critical theory. Students will be responsible for undertaking close readings of the texts as well as research projects.