Erasmus courses Spring 2018
Every student who wishes to be accepted to the following courses should contact Ms. Noémi Farkas academic institutional Erasmus coordinator (farkas.noemi@btk.elte.hu) to sign the Transcript of records/give permission to take the course(s).
Course code: BMI-FLMD-322E:03
Course title: Everyday Life in Socialist Hungary
Course convenor: Ferenc Hammer
Time and place: Tuesday, 14.15-15.45, Room 39
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The basic premise of the course is that the cultural embeddedness of the East Central European region’s political changes has turned out to be crucial, in terms of the nature and direction of those changes, let them be Stalinist takeovers, socialist reforms, democratic transitions, democratic consolidations or nationalist upheavals. Culture is a key concept in this course – that is, collectively created meanings people associate with their life. Artefacts, rituals and images of everyday life, and their qualitative-anthropological interpretations have occupied a central position in this approach to understand the region’s present and recent past. Students will be exposed to comparative (regional) empirical research results focusing on various cultural studies topics, as well as to key concepts regarding the roots of the region’s paradoxical culturalhistorical-political development. Classes will cover issues, such as everyday strategies of power exercise in communism, changes in cultural politics, media history of the period, popular culture, consumption, a critical history of jeans, nonconformist subcultures, etc. Each student is expected to prepare a one- or two-page long position paper (based on the literature or on special assignments) for each class during the semester. There will not be separate student presentations in the class. The final paper is expected to be 3500 words in length on a topic agreed with me beforehand. I expect the hard copy of the paper to be sent to me by January 16th 1 PM, and also I expect students to make a presentation on January 19th, 3 PM (its details will be discussed). At the last class there will be a test on the course readings and the lectures. The composition of the students’ grades will be made up of the following items: 35 % position papers, 35% final test, 20% final paper, 10% class participation.
Course code: BBN-Erasm01
Course title: Blogging in Budapest
Course convenor: Anna Gács-Veronika Hermann
Time and place: TBD
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
Course code: BMI-FLMD-213E.07
Course title: Concise History of Hungarian Cinema till 1989
Course convenor: Györgyi Vajdovich
Time and place: Monday 14.15-15.45, Room -137
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The course presents the history of Hungarian cinema providing a historical and cultural overview of certain trends and periods. Lectures will focus on different questions like European and Hungarian identity, the coexistence of author cinema and popular genre films, the influence of literature and other arts on films, and the importance of documentary and animated films in Hungarian cinema. The course will also present certain films or artists who became influential in European or world cinema.
Course code: BMI-FLMD- 213E.09
Course title: History of Film Music
Course convenor: Gergely Hubai
Time and place: Monday 9.00-10.30, Room 34
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The History of Film Music gives students a walkthrough on the history of film music from the earliest days of silent films through early sound films, the classic studio era as well as some modern developments. The course teaches you the basic terminology for film scoring and is richly illustrated with relevant examples of watching film excerpts with only the music.
Course code: BMI-FLMD-314E.09
Course title: Changing Faces of the Western: Myth and Genre
Course convenor: Tibor Hirsch
Time and place: Monday 12.30-14.00, Room -137
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The course will offer an overview on the Western both as a unique phenomenon within the American film history and as an independent genre with a rich typology and numerous ways of classification. On the other hand “Western phenomenon” is going to be analysed (in workshop frames) as the richest reservoir of cinematographic reflections on the American Myth. From this respect we will take the most benefit of the Western theory and Western typology of Will Wright (Six-Guns and Society, Berkeley: California Press, 1975.) as a guideline. Before dealing with the genre and the movies in this context we are going to touch some related topics, first of all the idea of the “Frontier” (using and discussing the different generic interpretations of the Turner Theory), and the “Myth”, referring to C.G. Jung, and Bronislaw Malinowski whose defining sentences are just good for a proper starting point: “Myth…safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man… Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force…”
Course code: BMI-FLMD-314E.18
Course title: Popular and Author Film Trends in Indian Cinema
Course convenor: Györgyi Vajdovich
Time and place: Thursday, 12.30-14.00, Room -137
Availability: BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
India produces the largest number of films per year in the world, and though this number includes films produced in different languages in different states or towns of India, Bollywood films constitute a considerable proportion of this amount. The course will focus on Hindi language cinema but will also give a brief introduction to the other film industries in other languages of India. The course will present the duality of commercial cinema and art cinema originating from the so-called Parallel Cinema of the 1950s, presenting their mode of production, distribution, topics and film styles. The course will give special attention to the transitory works between the two main trends emerging at the middle of the 2000s, which create one of the most interesting trends of present-day Indian cinema and create a kind of „semi-art” or „mid-way” cinema between the two trends.
Course code: BMI-FLMD-322E.19
Course title: Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Course convenor: Sándor Sajó
Time and place: Thursday, 09.00-10.30, Room 40
Availability: the course is not available anymore BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
This course focuses on what may be called “contemporary continental philosophy”. However, since contemporary philosophy is part and parcel of the Western philosophical tradition, we shall also read some classical texts. The central themes of the course are basic philosophical issues such as identity and difference, the same and the other, the human and the non-human, what is and what is not. The reading list includes Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, and Butler.
Course code: BMI-FLMD-322E.32
Course title: Theory of Adaptation
Course convenor: Katalin Teller
Time and place: Thursday, 16.00-17.30, Room 39
Availability: the course is not available anymore BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The goal of the course is to introduce the intermedial dimensions of adaptation strategies that go beyond sole film adaptations. The course will cover new theories of adaptation in a broad sense with special focus on the outcomes of research on intermediality. By clarifying diverse medial and ideological dimensions of the notion of adaptation, the course will analyze the historical roots of film adaptations, the problem of (literary) ekphrasis and the characteristics of audiobooks. The seminar will also entail a discussion of an adaptation in different media formats that will be selected by the course participants.
The evaluation will be based on active seminar participation and on a written assignment. Latter can cover either a case study of a selected adaptation or an essay comparing diverse theoretical approaches discussed during the seminar. For formal requirements follow the MLA guidelines.
Gottfried Boehm: Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache. In: GB, Helmut Pfotenhauer (eds.): Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Die Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Munich 1995, 23-40.
Jason Camlot: The Three-Minute Victorian Novel. Remediating Dickens into Sound. In: Matthew Rubery (ed.): Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies. New York 2011, 25-43.
Jens Eder: Transmediality and the Politics of Adaptation: Concepts, Forms, and Strategies. In: Dan Hassler-Forest, Pascal Nicklas (ed.): The Politics of Adaptation. Media Convergence and Ideology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015, 66-81.
Rainer Emig: Adaptation in Theory. In: Pascal Nicklas, Oliver Lindner (eds.): Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Literature, Film, and the Arts. Berlin, Boston 2012, 14-24.
Michel Foucault: The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). New York 2002, 3-18.
Linda Hutcheon, Siobhan O’Flynn: A theory of adaptation. 2nd ed. New York 2013, 1-32, 169-176.
Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis. The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, London 1992, 233-261.
Thomas Leitch: Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does it Matter? In: Deborah Cartmell (ed.): Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation. Chichester 2012, e-book.
- J. Th. Mitchell: Ekphrasis and the Other. In: WJTM: Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago 1994, 151-181.
Gabriele Rippl: Introduction. In: GR (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin, Boston 2015, 1-31.
Matthew Rubery: Introduction. Talking Books. In: MR (ed.): Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies. New York 2011, 1-21.
Julie Sanders: Adaptation and appropriation. New York 2006, 17-41.
Barbara Straumann: Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality. In: Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin, Boston 2015, 249-267.
William Verrone: Adaptation and the Avant-Garde. Alternative Perspectives on Adaptation Theory and Practice. New York 2011, 35-39, 55-100.
Course code: BMI-FLMD-232E.03
Course title: Seminar of Film Analysis: Cultural approaches to contemporary European Cinema
Course convenor: Hajnal Király
Time and place: Friday 12.30-14.00, Room 39
Availability: the course is not available anymore; BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
The course proposes a cultural approach to contemporary European cinema through ten representative films from all over Europe: Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Greece and Portugal. Topics like representations of space / spatial performances, migration, exile, memory work, contemporary (changing) gender roles, family structures, the gender – film genre correlation, the (figurative) representations of the body, as well as a detectable taste for allegorization will be explored with the help of a series of classic and contemporary theoretical writings. We will focus on social and cultural phenomena depicted in the films under analysis, attempting to answer questions like “why this topic? Why now? Why this way?” A symptomatic interpretation, however, does not exclude a formal, critical analysis of the chosen films, nor a comparative exploration of representations of converging topics in films from different countries.
An attendance to 75 % of the classes (only 3 absences are allowed), active participation in discussions (up to 5 points will be given) and presentation of one film on the basis of one theoretical article, as well as the moderation of the following discussion. The final mark will result from the individual presentation and the activity during the course.
At the end of the course students will be able to identify and compare social and cultural phenomena in films from different parts of Europe, as well as to use effectively cultural concepts and discourses in their interpretation. They will also be able to formulate questions and defend an argumentation, as well as to develop a balanced critical, comparative, theoretically grounded attitude towards contemporary European film products.
Indicative Reading:
Augé, Marc: Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso, 1995, pp. 43-115.
Elsaesser, Thomas: European Cinema Face-to-face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2005, pp.13-81, 464-490.
Elsaesser, Thomas: Tales of Sound and Fury. In Christine Gledhill (ed.): Home is Where the Heart is, 1990, pp. 43-69.
Foucault, Michel: Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1. (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27.
Mroz, Matilda: Framing Loss and Figuring Grief in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Screening the Past 2016/10. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2016/10/framing-loss-and-figuring-grief-in-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida
Hamid Naficy: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton, N. J, 2001, 10-33, 40-56, 222-225.
Sobchack, Vivian: Carnal Thoughts. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, 205-225.
Staat, Wim: Christian Petzold’s Melodramas. From Unknown Woman to Reciprocal Unknownness in Phoenix, Wolfsburg, and Barbara. Studies in European Cinema. Vol. 13, issue 3 (2016). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17411548.2016.1222739?src=recsys
Shapiro, Lawrence: Cinematic Impressions on the Female Amputee (Jacques Audiard: Rust and Bones, 2012. Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 33 no. 2 (2013). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3595/3241
Williams, Linda: Film Bodies: gender, genre, and Excess.
Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 2-13
Xavier, Ismail: Historical Allegory. In Robert Stam (ed.), A Companion to Film Theory, 333-362. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/03/shame.html
Course code: BMI-FLMD-322E.31
Course title: Critical Reading: Contemporary Trends in Film Theory
Course convenor: Bea Margiházi
Time and place: Wednesday, 14.15-15.45, Room -137
Availability: the first 5 MA students who contact me via email, only for MA students
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10
This course offers a seminar-based discussion of some major schools of film (and critical) theory, aiming to help students to understand the various connections between theory and practice. Every canonic theoretical text will be accompanied by another one that not only reflects critically on the original, but applies and tests its theoretical statements in the analysis of contemporary cinema. Our working method is focused around the idea of “reading theory” in three senses of that phrase. Firstly, it aims to foster the critical reading and analytic skills required to make sense of what may appear complex and forbidding texts: how do we read theory? Secondly, it introduces distinctions between different types of critical reading to help differentiate between and compare theoretical positions. Finally, it aims to link theoretical positions back to practice by showing their relevance in film analysis and interpretation. Students will be encouraged to develop their own critical reading strategies, and apply them in their own research and thesis writing project.
Course code: BBN-Erasm02
Course title: Journalismus Praxis
Course convenor: Károly T. Vörös
Time and place: TBD
Availability: In German Language, BA, MA
Type: Seminar
ECTS: 10