ClassInfo

Regular Academic Session

 

AmIn 3402, American Indians and the Cinema, satisfies the Humanistic Studies criteria of the Arts/Humanities Core through its focus on the analysis and reflection on the representations of American Indian peoples in both historical and contemporary films. Students taking the course focus on developing a critical vocabulary for understanding both what film is and how it has historically represented American Indian peoples as well as exploring how these representations have changed, or not, in response to changing historical/social contexts. Through examinations and papers students will engage in the task of articulating their critical insights concerning the films and the contexts they emerge from and reflect on.

AmIn 3402, American Indians and the Cinema, satisfies the Diversity & Social Justice theme as the course examines historical and contemporary representations of American Indian peoples in film, the power inequities reflected in those representations, and historical and contemporary American Indian resistance to those representations. How have, for example, from the earliest development of American cinema, particular images of Indians in the movies served the interests of a nationalist agenda rather than the interests of Native individuals and nations themselves? In this sense, the course engages with the ideas that some images are socially constructed and so serve the purposes of those making the images rather than the peoples being imaged. As such, the course engages with issues of institutional stratification as it explores the way the Hollywood film industry constructs and maintains a notion of �Indianness� which is difficult for American Indian peoples to respond to as their films may lay outside commercial boundaries of production value and distribution that make it difficult to get their work to viewers. The course aims to make such institutional strata clear to students, offers them the tools to engage in a critique of conventional cultural representations of American Indian people, and exposes them to an emerging body of work by American Indian filmmakers asserting their own authority in controlling their images and offering their stories to the viewing world at large. Most significantly, the course addresses the theme of diversity and social justice in the U.S. by exploring how films by American Indian filmmakers offer a differing idea of what American Indian experience has been and is--and ultimately examines the development of an American Indian �aesthetic� within this body of work by Native filmmakers that is grounded in historical and ongoing cultural viability.

Students are introduced to the idea that film and film criticism are creative arts (not just academic arguments) and as such are an important means for thinking about the world. They are not just ⿿art for art⿿s sake,⿝ but are rather a means to critically engage with critical questions of life in the United States. Questions of social justice demand creative thinking and films and film criticism, like political thought or historical investigation, are a means to think about and address historical injustices as well as a means to recognize and advance the course of justice. In their final project, students are encouraged to apply the thematic ideas about colonialism and decolonization met in the course readings and use them to generate an original work of criticism that is both insightful and creative in weaving together sources from film criticism to literature to history to political science.

The final project is assessed on a rubric that evaluates the depth of research of the project, the clarity with which course themes are articulated as a means of contextualizing the analyzed film(s), and the readibility of the narrative presentation of the analysis (or, perhaps more simply, the creativity of their presentation of their research and critical insights).