Post-Cinema (Shane Denson, Stanford University)

This compact course explores the current state of US American cinema and its relations to and differences from 20^th-century film. The course is taught by Shane Denson, a professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University, USA, who is visiting the American Studies department this summer as a guest professor. He has written a book on the very topic of this course: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016); https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/. Prof. Denson is also the author and editor of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020), Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). His websites are https://shanedenson.com/ and https://art.stanford.edu/people/shane-denson

 In this course, we focus on the recent shift from analog to digital and algorithmic media in order to think about the larger stakes of theorizing moving images as technological and cultural media. We consider the impact of digital technologies on film, think about the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices of contemporary motion pictures, and try to understand the experiential dimensions of spectatorship in today's altered viewing conditions.

In addition to viewing a range of recent and contemporary films and artworks, we also engage more directly and materially with post-cinematic moving images: we experiment with scholarly and experimental uses of non-linear video editing for the purposes of film analysis, cinemetrics, and a variety of academic and creative responses to moving image media.

The course addresses key issues in recent film and media theory and, especially in its hands-on components, encourages experimentation with methods of digital humanities, computational media art, and other creative practices.