New Indigenous Cinema
In recent years, a new era of indigenous directors, actors, screenwriters, and crewmembers throughout the Americas has brought fresh stories to cinemas and televisions. With varied themes and narrative approaches, the films from which this course samples diverge and link to each other in fascinating ways despite, for example, a geography that stretches from Guatemala to Canada, as in this series. This course will examine how their many building blocks — humor, horror, realism, and fantasy — speak to past and future Indigenous cinema.
About the Instructor
Ashlee Bird is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and a Native American game designer. Professor Bird is Western Abenaki and her scholarship theorizes digital sovereignty, drawing on multiple fields to address representations of Native American characters in video games.
Tara Kenjockety is the Undergraduate Community Engagement and Anthropology Librarian at Hesburgh Libraries. She is an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and part of the Seneca Nation.
Sponsored by the Department of American Studies, Native American Initiatives, and the David A. Heskin and Marilou Brill Endowment for Excellence.
Past Series
Hollywood In and Out of Vietnam
While often referred to as the “living room war” due to its insertion in the home via television, the Vietnam War became a common subject matter for films inside and outside the Hollywood studio system for years after the fighting ended. This capsule course looks at three major Hollywood studio films on the subject of the Vietnam War while also looking for comparisons and contrasts with three films made without the studio system’s budget, access, and (un)written rules.
About the Instructor
Peter Cajka is Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies. His research sits at the intersection of Catholic Studies, the history of ideas, and the history of sexuality. His book, Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021.
Early 70s Italian Cinema
The political and cultural turbulency of the 1960s rerouted many already-celebrated filmmakers’ styles while creating new pathways for emerging directors. During the early 1970s, that mix of old and new led to intriguing films around the world, with Italy being no exception. This course will look at this period of Italian cinema as both a transitional period and one with fully articulated techniques through sampling filmmakers at various stages of their careers.
People: Professor Charles L. Leavitt IV
Professor Charles L. Leavitt IV is a scholar of modern and contemporary Italy, with a particular research focus on the literary and cultural history of the post-war period, and teaches Italian film at the University of Notre Dame. His work explores the efforts of artists and intellectuals to construct Italian histories, identities, and cultures with their creative and critical interventions across diverse media. Investigating these efforts through formal and contextual analysis, he draws on and seeks to contribute to literature, film studies, and history scholarship.
Albertine Cinémathèque and Contemporary French Film
Through a partnership with the Albertine Cinémathèque and its Film Festival (fka the Tournées Film Festival), this course brought a survey of Francophone films to the Michiana community.
Paired with Learning Beyond the Classics, the Albertine Cinémathèque Film Festival as a course reflected French cinema’s diversity and richness through various genres — fiction, documentary, and repertory films — made by emerging directors and legends from both inside and outside France. The resulting mélange of voices and styles offered enrollees the opportunity to experience through a panoramic lens the past, present, and future of French cinema.
People: Dr. Sonja Stojanovic
Dr. Sonja Stojanovic specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literatures. Her current book project analyzes representations of cashiers in French cultural productions from the 19th century to the present. She also has a longstanding interest in contemporary women’s writing, particularly the work of Marie Darrieussecq.
