Università Roma Tre

FILM CRITICISM WORKSHOP

Program

Film criticism is not taught, it is learned and it is practiced by watching films and discussing them.
The Workshop is based essentially on exercizes and interactions.

Exercize 1. Seeing the film.
From sacred viewing to multiform viewing (new platforms, new habits, new viewers).
To orient oneself critically in the contemporary chaos of images: to make order, to distinguish, simply “to see”.
Evolution and diversification in writing criticism.

Exercize 2. Analyzing film.
Notes on some methodological and analytical tools: formalism, structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis (manifest content and latent content).
Description and evaluation. Text and context. The reality represented and the representation of reality. Criticism as a form of thought.

Exercize 3. Verbalizing judgment.
Content, structure, form, finalization. At the service of the work, from the viewer’s point of view.
Against criticism of taste (Galvano Della Volpe), against interpretation (Susan Sontag), against sociologism, aesthetic mysticism, idealism.
Critical models and the system of reference.

Exercize 4. Of prejudice and novelty.
Auteur cinema and so-called commercial film (genres).
Greta Garbo vs Doris Day.
TV series (new forms, new dramaturgy, new expectations).

Exercize 5. Specialization and contamination.
Specialist criticism and multidisciplinary criticism.
From the filmic specifics to postmodernism.
From André Bazin’s ‘What is Cinema?’ to the films to come.