This graduate course focuses on the broad historical, technological,
and aesthetic determinants shaping the evolution of motion pictures
from the early-nineteenth century to 1909.  Avoiding a technologically
determinist teleology, we will explore a diverse range of practices,
discourses, and products which shaped the complex visual culture of
modernity.  We will investigate relevant developments in literature (
the scientific naturalist mode), popular visual culture (the
illustrated newspaper and comic strip, stereographs, panoramas,
postcards, pornography), science (photography and the archive), the
arts (theatrical melodrama, stage effects and magic), as well as the
interrelated practices of tourism and colonialism (magic lantern
lecture shows, world fairs, ethnographic displays).  Primary texts
include writings by Poe, Zola, Baudelaire, Holmes and Edison.
Secondary texts include Benjamin, Foucault, Schivelbusch, Crary, Jay.
The second half of the course will be devoted to studying the specific
representational, exhibition, and production modes of early cinema (
1895-1909), spanning from the films of the Lumière brothers, Edison
and George Méliès to D.W. Griffith's early work for Biograph.  Central
to this course will be an investigation of questions of race, gender
and nation in the complex nexus that arose around cinematic and
related visual technologies.  The course employs a "media archaeology"
approach to film history, in other words, one which remains faithful
to the specific historical context of this evolution while also
pointing to connections to be made with more recent media
configurations (around special effects technology, action cinema, 'new
media', etc).  Students will be expected to produce a substantive
primary research project for this course.