University of Bordeaux

This course involves building a project using complex installation devices that fundamentally question plasticity, setting and space, and the place of the spectator in relation to the production. Students respond to a subject, incentive, problem, or theme through increasingly personal mediums, postures, gestures, and tools to situate this realization in the field of contemporary creation.

This course has two parts. The first part surveys some of the main stages in the evolution of the American horror film. Starting from its literary influences, it then focuses on its growth and relationship with the then budding television in the 1950s. It analyzes the role of the TV news and the Hays code in the 1960s. And, as it reaches the heydays of horror films in the 1970s (with the involvement of the New Hollywood in the field of horror), it eventually observes how the conventions of the genre have successfully spread into some of the best TV series at the turn of the century. The course provides a mix of theory and practice with the analysis of some scenes, echoing what will have been shown in the first part of the class. The study of these excerpts develop the ability to express skills for commenting on cinematographic works of art and provides an opportunity to write a short file on a film or a TV series. The second part of the course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of comics as a medium based on “sequential” images, to be distinguished from photography’s still images and film’s moving images. It is based on the analysis of various samples of primarily American comics by means of the interpretive grids presented by Scott McCloud’s UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART (1993), an introductive study of the comics medium presented as a book-length comic. 

This course, divided into two parts, studies a British novel and an American novel and their cinematic adaptations. It provides a close reading of FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy, and then introduces the basics of film theory to understand each movie. The main objective of this to familiarize students with the joint study of a literary work and one or more film adaptations by relying on several case studies.