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Cartesian Theater

The films encompass a wide range of subject matter and content, with selections from collections of aesthetically and culturally relevant films. Each film is specifically selected to illustrate and highlight key concepts from the reading that it is paired with in order to aid students in understanding and absorbing the material. The films also act as a resource that students can tap into as refere

09/22/2015

Wednesday, October 1st, we'll be screening Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring.... 0_0

A drama focusing on a widower and his unmarried live-in daughter who attends to all the household’s needs. The daughter has no desire to marry and only seeks to attend to her father; however, her father wants her to live her own life unhampered by his situation. This film is intended to be paired with the selection from Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, which explores the notion of the lack of pursuit of a transcendental signifier, and the perceived semiotic indifference present in Japanese culture.

Late Spring is by and large the best example of Japanese minimalism from the postwar period, and within its cinematography and the way that Ozu handles the elements of drama and development, lies several of the elements that Barthes illustrates in Empire of Signs.

09/12/2015

This week, on Wednesday the 18th, we’ll be screening 2008’s Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about the first Israeli/Lebanese war by filmmaker Ari Folman. We’ll be examining this film through the lens of Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” as a mechanism of analysis. The film is currently the only animated documentary in existence and garnered a fair bit of controversy, especially in Lebanon, where it is still banned. The primary focus of examination that the film explores the nature of memory as the filmmaker attempts to piece together his memories of his service in the war through interviews with friends and soldiers who also served in the same conflict, the animation serves to reinforce the murky, surreal nature of memory and sensation.