Friday 20 January 2017

Course idea and (preliminary) schedule

Toni Negri has claimed that “the metropolis is for the post-fordist worker what the factory was for the fordist one". The metropolis has become the most significant site of production and the battleground of global precariat. In some sense, we all live in the metropolis. The course looks at movies that represent or are set in the background of the metropolis, and at texts and thinkers who study the concept or the relevant phenomena of present day global metropolis and its development.
The course will consist of readings, screenings of the films and discussions afterwards, and a final assignment.

Preliminary Schedule. We'll work with this, but are open to suggestions from the students, concerning either films, texts, even topics. (Showing the final program now)

19.1. What the course is all about and Eetu Viren on What a Metropolis is all about.

2.2. Beginning from classics (NOTE: meet Arts House, room 245 2.nd floor)
Walter Benjamin: Some Motifs on Baudelaire (for instance https://langurbansociology.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/benjamin-on-some-motifs-in-baudelaire.pdf)
Fritz Lang: Metropolis

16.2. Big city has its own logic
Jane Jacobs: Death & Life: Introduction and Chapter 2. (Can be downloaded as pdf from internet)
Barry Sonnenfield: MIB I 

2.3. The Global City
Shunji Iwai: Swallowtail Butterfly

16.3. Artificial life
Ridley Scott: Blade Runner


Precarias a la deriva, documentary by the collective 

20.4. Controlling the many as many
Antonio Negri: Multitude and Metropolis
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri: Empire, esp. chapters 1.2. Biopolitical Production and 4.3. The Multitude Against Empire
Alex Cox (1984): Repoman

27.4. Metropolis and Movie
Thom Andresen: Los Angeles Plays Itself


11.5. Final curtain… assignments ... Discussion.