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.
Summer Film School is a great way to learn how to recognize and analyze the unique conventions movies use to have flat, giant images on a wall make us laugh, weep, and cheer.
Broken into four classes, Summer Film School this year is going to focus on the world of tomorrow. We’re going to be asking and answering how films, throughout various points in history, have imagined and created ideas and physical pictures of the future.
To do that, we’re going to unpack the settings, tone, dialogue, plots, and themes of four films dotted throughout the 20th Century: Metropolis (1927), The 10th Victim (1965), Back to the Future: Part II (1989), and The Matrix (1999).
Lectures will run about 30 minutes on each subject before screening each classic film. After the film, there will be a discussion of how the film spoke to its present by depicting the future and what we can learn from it today.
