PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD CINEMA

In the first instance, the course introduces films of outstanding importance that have made significant contributions to the concept of 'world cinema ' but are also difficult to see in this country and derive from unfamiliar film cultures. The course is then designed to introduce these film cultures, with a certain amount of interdisciplinary study, through their reflection of and contribution to contemporary political and aesthetic debates. The course is divided in two parts. Part I will examine two important periods of Brazilian film history: Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave of the 1960s) and the so-called ‘Brazilian Film Revival ’ (from 1995 onwards). Films by directors from Cinema Novo founder Glauber Rocha to the new cinema leader Walter Salles will be examined and compared in the light of questions such as the nation, globalisation, realism, auteurism and post-modernism, with a particular attention to utopian motifs. Part II will look at East Asian films, particularly Japanese, also comparing past and recent productions to detect historical trends and recurrent aesthetic features. Films by directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-Liang will be analysed as expressions of a modern agnosticism derived from religious tradition