Spring 2008 Courses

English 260-01: Film Studies: Gangster Cinema, 1930s-Present (Jarrin)

M/W/F 3:30-4:30pm, HUM 401

Decades before Don Corleone and Tony Soprano became household names, in the 1930s the figure of the American gangster emerged as the archetypal antihero: equal parts man, myth, and social type, typically working-class and ethnic other (the down-on-his luck immigrant led astray), the prominence of the on-screen gangster reflected Prohibition-era economic/political anxieties and social/spatial transformations in the American city. Following in the footsteps of silent classics like Raoul Walsh's Regeneration and Josef von Sternberg's Underworld, '30s gangster talkies such as Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface warned against urban crime as social pathology – a criminal tendency that could allegedly be cured through enforcement, education, and psychological reform. Throughout the postwar era, gangsters continued to represent the threat of enemies within, key players in Cold-War era film noir and increasingly central to representations of London, Paris, and Tokyo criminal underworlds.

This course will examine the genealogy of the gangster film within the United States and its adaptations in French New Wave, Japanese yakuza, and more recent British, Irish, Asian, and African contexts. We'll build a technical vocabulary for how to discuss film as an audiovisual art form (camera work, perspective, framing, editing, lighting, soundtrack), while also examining the signature visual style of particular genres that surface within the gangster film (German expressionism, film noir, detective genre, war/espionage film, Western, documentary). We'll ask: What were/are the underlying representational politics of the gangster film? Historically, how did the nationalist and/or anarchist politics of immigrant mafias become allied with the enterprise of American capitalism? How do specific films present the relationship between organized labor and organized crime? The Organization and the Family? What role has religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, played within the lived and symbolic histories of these films? How has the American gangster genre influenced – and been influenced by – other (inter)national cinemas? How might we understand the transnational gangster film as reflective of increasingly diasporic criminal subcultures? In addition to weekly required screenings, we'll read ~150 pages a week of film and critical theory, as well as the source texts for several films.

Likely films: The Regeneration (1915); Underworld (1927); Little Caesar (1930); Public Enemy (1931); Scarface (1932/1983); The Informer (1935); Angels with Dirty Faces (1938); White Heat (1948); The Big Heat (1953); Rififi (1955); Breathless (1960); Mafioso (1962); Branded to Kill (1967); Pierrot le Fou (1969); Bonnie & Clyde (1967); The Godfather (1972); Mean Streets (1973); Miller's Crossing (1990); Boyz in the Hood (1991); Reservoir Dogs (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994); The General (1998); Ichi the Killer (2001); Infernal Affairs (2002); Tsotsi (2005); The Departed (2006)

*First day attendance required* Requirements: Journals (25%); Papers (50%); Participation/Quizzes/Presentation (25%); Weekly film screenings (day/time/location TBD).

Spring 2008 Course Listings