This special Year of Games course examines how filmmakers and writers play games with narrative structure, twisting conventional patterns and expectations by infusing them with chance, randomness, surreality, meta-reality, false starts, restarts, puzzles, dreams, reverse orders, surprise endings, and what Jacques Derrida called “the joyous affirmation of the free play of the world.” We will examine a wide range of examples, including but not limited to: theorists (Barthes, Bakhtin, Huizinga, and Derrida); films (Memento, Inception, The Usual Suspects, Open Your Eyes, Slacker,After Hours, Last Year at Marienbad, The Phantom of Liberty, and Groundhog Day); writers (Borges, Cortázar, Calvino, Joyce, Nabokov, Ashbery, Perec, Lautréamont, and David Foster Wallace); Dada and Surrealist film, art, and writing; and “Structural film” of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Frampton, Snow, and Warhol. Coursework will include experimental and creative projects, as well as analytical and critical essays.
Courses > 2011 Fall
Electives
403 | TR 12-1:30pm | FBH 201
Electives
CINE 310 - Playing Games with Stories
COML 309 | ENGL 292403 | TR 12-1:30pm | FBH 201