Module description
In this module we will examine the relationship between the novel and the film, with particular emphasis on questions of desire, subjectivity and temporality. The module takes two texts as its starting point: Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time-Image, and Proust’s The Captive, volume five of Remembrance of Things Past. It also examines the emergence of slow cinema, with a specific focus on queer adaptations that explore different experiences of time passing. We will look at a series of literary texts and their adaptations on screen to ask: how do filmmakers draw on, expand, extend or disrupt the experience of time explored through novels that focus on non-normative, troubling and disruptive subjectivities and desires? What are the paradoxes of adapting such works in time-based media? How do our experiences of the time of reading and watching differ across media? The module looks in detail at textual and cinematic works on the themes of waiting, expectation, reaching, extending and transgressing temporal and corporeal boundaries. Drawing equally on theories of queer temporality, through the proposed texts and films we will analyse and explore the alternative ways of being they propose as these emerge across expanded chronological frameworks. Students will be introduced to some of the key ideas from 20th and 21st Century queer theory, film theory, film philosophy and literary analysis, as well as developing skills in close reading and sequence analysis.
Assessment details
one 4000-word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
The educational aims for this module are:
- To allow for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between literature and film
- To consider time-based media in its specificity as well as to understand the temporalities of reading and cinema spectatorship.
Students will gain an understanding of adaptation theory as well as key terms and concepts in slow cinema, and an understanding of how these developed from philosophical and literary analysis in the late 20th century.
Learning outcomes
Having completed this module, students will be able to demonstrate practical and theoretical skills appropriate to Level 7. Students will:
- Gain an in-depth knowledge of key critical and film-philosophical concepts on temporality in film, such as the time-image
- Gain an in-depth understanding of the similarities and differences in textual and audiovisual representation, in particular in relation to their differing temporalities.
- Carry out both film analysis and textual analysis to a high standard, as well as gain an indepth understanding of how to undertake comparative analysis
- Be able to analyse specific texts and films as well as extracts of these in detail, demonstrating nuanced and complex analytical skills
- Be well equipped to choose and design their own research questions in relation to the material studied.
Teaching pattern
two hour seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985)
- Marcel Proust, The Captive (vol. v of Remembrance of Things Past, trans Scott Moncrieff 1923)
- Chantal Akerman, La Captive (2000) [Film]
- Antonio di Benedetto, Zama, trans Esther Allen (2016 [1956])
- Lucrecia Martel, Zama (2017) [film]
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
- Sally Potter, Orlando (1992) [film]