My teaching interests include cinema and media studies; popular visual culture; U.S. fiction; religion and secularism studies; cultural criticism in the internet age; African American Studies; literary and cinematic realisms; American Modernism; contemporary television; digital cultures; and historical fictions.
I am the recipient of the 2016 Robert Udick Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award from Louisiana State University.
Recent courses include:
Hitchcock and Hitchcockians
This is a course about director Alfred Hitchcock and the “Hitchcockians”—filmmakers who modeled their movies on his innovations, critics and theorists who use his work as problematic case studies or perfect examples, viewers who have seen the crises of their world through the funhouse mirror of his films. In tracing the outlines of Hitchcock’s long career, we will pair seven of his greatest films with the films and film theories they inspired, many of them reflecting the critical and creative legacy of feminist and queer theory. In each pairing, the contemporary film is, in some way, a critical revision of Hitchcock’s original, one that is revelatory of Hitchcock’s brilliance and blindnesses. Pairings will likely include Psycho with Mary Harron’s American Psycho, Notorious with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Rebecca with Jane Campion’s The Piano, Rear Window with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, Vertigo with David Fincher’s Gone Girl. By the end of the course, students will have a deep understanding of the way that Hitchcock’s movies live on in the visual culture we see around us and the ways we have learned to see it.
The Cinema of Attractions: Silent Era to Digital Age
The very first films ever made at the turn of the twentieth century were short, shocking, spectacular, and not at all concerned with story. Historians refer to these films as “the cinema of attractions.” While largely replaced by more conventional narrative films within a few years, the aesthetic of these attractions survived in unexpected places, often where film form has been challenged by new technology. This course will endeavor to trace a history of film aesthetics in the twentieth century by paying attention to when and where the cinema of attractions re-surfaces. We’ll cover early cinema, avant-garde movements, the Hollywood musical, the Hollywood blockbuster, music videos, and we’ll end the semester by looking at all of the places—from Vine to Pixar—where the cinema of attractions is alive and well in the digital age.
The Sacred Screen: Religion and World Cinema
In 1913, D.G. Phalke, who would come to be known as the father of Indian cinema, claimed that seeing an American film of the life of Christ inspired him to become a director. The history of world cinema is filled with stories of divine inspiration, and filmmakers throughout the twentieth century have been fascinated by faith. In this course, we will look at the presence of religion in several global film traditions. From silent Christ films in Europe and the U.S. to the controversial Passions of Pasolini and Gibson; the punk revolt against Islamic fundamentalism in Persepolis to the vengeful revolt against Christian evangelicalism in There Will Be Blood; supernatural incarnations from Ingmar Bergman to The Exorcist; the near-silent meditations in Ki-duk Kim’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring to the near-silent suffering of A Serious Man, we will think cross-culturally about the political, aesthetic, and spiritual investments of world cinema.
Multimedia Realisms
Henry James and The Bachelor, Grand Theft Auto and the French New Wave, Zadie Smith and Instagram—at some point or another, everything on this list has been described using one capacious, contradictory term: “realism.” We will compare and contrast texts from the nineteenth century to the present across a wide variety of media— films, novels, TV series, paintings, social media—that endeavor to represent reality in radically different ways.
American Spectacle: Visual Cultures at the Turn of the Century
The American turn of the century was a crucial moment in the histories of literary and cinematic realism, but it was also a boon time for hoaxes, humbugs, frauds, and fantasies. The eye that relished realist depictions of the urban scene also looked for scenes of magic and monstrosity. In this course, we’ll encounter a bizarre array of visual cultures that offered spectacles of the real, the unreal, and everything in between. And we’ll finish the course by considering how the questions addressed by these texts from the turn of the twentieth century can help us understand our own digital present.
What Cinema Is: Film Theory, Film Criticism
What is cinema? This simple question has been debated and fought over since the medium came into existence. This course will introduce students to a diverse array of the voices that have contributed to this conversation: the theorists, critics, and filmmakers whose writings have shaped everything we think we know about film. Each week will focus on a different theoretical perspective for the study of film through both scholarly writing on the topic and popular criticism. We will then endeavor to apply these ideas to representative films from across the globe and the century. Throughout, students will have the opportunity to contribute to a course blog where they will practice the various forms of criticism we’ve studied in the classroom: everything from the film review to the research essay to the TV recap.
The Afterlives of Realism: Film, Literature, Reality (graduate seminar)
This course will take a comparative approach to a wide variety of “realisms” from the nineteenth century to the present, in theory and practice. Starting with Howellsian “High Realism” and the Actuality tradition of early cinema, this course will move back and forth between literature, film, and even television and video games. Rather than endeavoring to create a streamlined meta-narrative of this term, we will explore the diversity of ways that “realism” has been invoked as a way of categorizing texts and think about what kind of authority it bestows upon those texts that bear its mark. Potential case studies include French poetic realism, Soviet Realism, Italian Neorealism, direct cinema, magic realism, “hysterical realism,” Dogme 95, Mumblecore, Reality TV, and the “perceptual realism” of CGI.
Surveillance and Cinema
A film scholar once said that cinema’s greatest power was its ability to reveal “things normally unseen.” If film makes the invisible visible, then it makes sense that, since the beginning of the medium, filmmakers have been interested in telling stories about surveillance and about the detectives, spies, and obsessives who have made it their art. This course will introduce students to methodologies for the close formal analysis of film through attention to works—from Hitchcock to Homeland—that think about the practices and perils of surveillance.
Adaptations
Since its very beginning, film has been interested in the adaptation of literature. From ponderous epics like Quo Vadis? to works of pulp fiction like The Big Sleep, literature has been a source of content, prestige, and even folly since cameras first filmed actors. In this course, we will view a variety of film adaptations, read their source material, and investigate the formal and ideological choices made by the filmmakers. We’ll also be looking at films with non-traditional approaches to adaptation: remakes, television serializations, and even film adaptations of other films. This course will serve as an introduction to the primary questions of contemporary adaptation studies but also to methodologies for the close formal analysis of literature and film.
Phillip Maciak 