Instructor: Eric Rentschler
Spring 2015
This seminar revisits the Frankfurt School and its deliberations on film, radio, and television as well as mass culture in general. We will devote the majority of the term to the work of three seminal figures: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. In addition, we will reflect on contributions of filmmakers, scholars, and writers which draw on and engage with the perspectives of the Frankfurt School, including, for instance, texts by Ernst Bloch, Hanns Eisler, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, and Miriam Hansen. We will focus on the debates catalyzed by the emergence of film and modern mass media (especially about the socio-psychological effects of a nascent industrialized visual culture) and also give some thought to the pertinence of these debates for our own contemporary culture of convergence. The class sessions will be conducted in English; all readings are in English.