Film Themes and Genres: Cinema of Resistance

Cross-listed with FILM_VS 2860

As the history of global film shows, filmmakers continued to make movies under authoritarian governments. And, in countries lucky enough to expel authoritarian governments, filmmakers certainly made movies about them and their legacies. In this class, we’ll watch a series of movies made during and after authoritarian governments, using four countries as cases studies: occupied France during World War II, Brazil under the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, South Korea prior to the democratic reforms of 1987, and post-1979 Iran. We’ll ask how filmmakers respond to, and in some cases manage to still criticize, authoritarian governments bent on censoring their work, and also how they subsequently deal with their countries’ troubled historical legacies. In the process we’ll learn a lot about both film industries outside the US, and about film genre—asking if the cinema of resistance in fact constitutes a genre that we can identify in different times and places, and, if so, what its key features are.