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Shadow of a Doubt: Mistrusting the World in Contemporary American Cinema

Cultures cinématographiques 02DMI722 / 3 ECTS – 18h / Évaluation session 1 : assidu·es CC ; non-assidu·es ET Dossier / Évaluation session 2 : Dossier

18h – Florian Tréguer

Many Hollywood movies depict a skewed and ever-shifting reality in which normal rules no longer apply, blurring lines between waking consciousness, dream states and altered states of perception. This cinema of skepticism and uncertainty blossomed in Hollywood in the wake of World War II. Some Hitchcock films (like the voyeuristic Rear Window and the obsessive Vertigo) paved the way to a world of deceptive appearances, with its loss of sense of what is real and true. Antonioni’s photographer in Blow-Up (1966) further interrogated the reliability of perceived reality. This crisis in interpretation also spread to the political thrillers of the 70s as well as the science fiction of the 80s. No longer a faithful reflection of the world, the image now tends to detach itself from it to become a mere decor, a pretense and a delusive surface (think of the all-too-perfect world of Seahaven in The Truman Show). This course then purposes to scrutinize a selection of American movies produced over the past few decades as symptomatic representations of doubt in contemporary culture.

Movie list:

The Woman in the Window (Lang, 1944), Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Lang, 1956), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), The Trial (Welles, 1962), Mickey One (Penn, 1965), The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), Night Moves (Penn, 1975), Blow Out (De Palma, 1981), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), The Thing (Carpenter, 1982), Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983), Body Double (De Palma, 1984), Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986), They Live (Carpenter, 1988), Barton Fink (Coen, 1991), The Game (Fincher, 1997), Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997), The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999), Waking Life (Linklater, 2001), Good Kill (Niccol, 2014), Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell, 2018).

Selected bibliography

  • Hoberman, Jim. The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And the Mythology of the Sixties. New York & London, The New Press, 2005.
  • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, Duke University Press, 1990.
  • Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995.
  • Ledoux, Aurélie. L’Ombre d’un doute. Le cinéma américain contemporain et ses trompe-l’œil. Rennes, PUR, 2012.