Communication technologies’ forms continue to evolve and this seminar looks closely at intertextual and convergent relationships between film and new media/technologies/information machines and the popular cultures they support. The feature film (think of Minority Report) is a principal way that audiences are introduced to new ideas about where technology is headed, and how we should think about its future roles in everyday life, politics and economics. Through focused readings on technology, as well as viewing films promoting various ideas about new information machines and the kinds of material and virtual futures these films invite us to imagine, students will achieve greater understanding of the complexities that flow from and contribute to film’s role in the ever-changing form, deployment and experience of newer media.

The seminar is organized around three interlocking concerns:

1. Intertextuality/Convergence: Media artifacts such as films, TV programs and video games increasingly exist with deliberate and explicit intertextual reference to each other. Blade Runner was not only a film but also a computer game and was inspired by Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? More recent films such as The Matrix are deployed intertextually as several commodity forms at once; however, Internet sites are increasingly central to the polyvalent success of such offerings. The Matrix’s DVD release, for example, includes hybrid materials such as deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes “documentaries,” and anamorphic techniques not used in the movie version.

2.- Relationships between Film and New Technologies: The intertextuality noted above increasingly relies on what Bolter and Grusin refer to as “remediation”–new technologies such as the web borrow forms and contents from earlier media just as T.V. and film increasingly incorporate these very technologies or representations thereof into their purview. Film is central to organizing the cultural discourse around technology through its ability to popularize specific images of new technologies and to suggest a range of cultural attitudes that attend their introduction and social diffusion. The seminar, therefore, looks at how film depicts new technologies – what theories of technology and subjectivity implicitly or explicitly inform, for example, a film such as RoboCop and its view of cyborg subjectivity connected to a use of virtuality fully integrated with bodily sensing? What are the mutually inflective relationships among older and new technologies? Are older media always a “step behind” print/the novel in representing new technologies? Or might a film such as Minority Report introduce new formalizations of ideological practices of viewing and surveillance unavailable to, for example, less “immediate” forms such as the Dick short story on which it is based?

3.- The Value of Reading Across Different Forms of Representation and “Genres”: It has sometimes been argued, for example, that director David Cronenberg’s films (think Videodrome or eXistenZ) are informed by academic postmodern theory and writing. It is, however, the intention of this seminar to enquire into ways that different forms of articulating and mediating theoretical and social concerns might each reflect what Raymond Williams, in The Long Revolution (1960), refers to as the “structure of feeling” of a period. We will also look at how classical film noir’s specific views of subjectivity and its deployment of technologies inform more recent instructions about technology and social relations on view in contemporary science fiction and neo-noir.

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