Film & Television Studies: LASP: On Dreams and the Cinema

Intensive course in a broad disciplinary area (humanities, social sciences, arts, or natural sciences). Part of an integrated first-year experience in which students take 2-4 classes exploring aesthetic, humanistic, social, linguistic, environmental, or scientific issues. May repeat for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Co-requisite: Enrollment in the appropriate Liberal Arts Scholars Program.

LASP students only; instructor permission

Why do we dream? What is our relationship to dreaming? What do dreams reveal about our psyche? The course will begin with an overview of Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams. After this thorough study, we will investigate the surrealist filmmakers who looked to dreams for their inspiration as well as contemporary films that engage dream sequences or dream like narrative structures or interludes. We will compare dreams and filmmaking as we begin to learn about film form and editing. During this part of the course, students will study the basic vocabulary of film form as they learn to see film form in a new way. We will then apply these concepts to the films we are studying to gain an understanding of the aesthetic, theoretical, technological, social, and economic considerations surrounding this cinema.

To investigate the ideas we are studying, students will have weekly reading responses and screening notes, two short papers and three creative projects during which they will make images and short films that are inspired by the topics we are studying.

Your evaluation will be generated from the above assignments.