Elective

CLIT7014 Film and Popular Culture

This course aims to examine the intricate relation between cinema and popular culture. Through the analysis of examples from the cinema of the Euro-American and Asian traditions, issues in connection with the interfusion of high and low culture, class structure and the popular arts, authorship, stars, and film genre, cultural myth and ideology, the global circulation of film, and audience and the cinematic public sphere will be discussed. With the specific emphasis on the multifaceted relation between cinema and popular culture, the course will explore how in some instances popular cinema is always in a dialectical relationship with what we might call "counter/art/independent" cinema while in other occasions, the popular and the independent cannot be easily separated.