FRS 002U —
Sec. 001 —
(2 unit) — CRN 55921 — W 3:10 – 5:00pm — 25 Wellman
Unhappy Families: Staging Family Trauma in
Contemporary Film
Instructor: Gail Finney, Program in Comparative Literature, College of
Letters and Science
Description: Family trauma is primal trauma: the ancient Greek
tragedians knew that all that is necessary for a tragedy is a family.
At the turn
of this millennium, American film has begun to devote increasing attention to
family trauma: not simply divorce, inept parents, and alcoholism, but radical,
destructive alienation and lack of communication between family
members; addictions
of all kinds; child and spousal abuse; child molestation and
parent-child incest;
sibling incest; suicide; and murder. After studying a prototypical depiction of
family trauma in Sophocles's play Oedipus the King, the seminar will
take a close look at the portrayal of this theme in several
contemporary American
films, with an eye to discovering how these works, through the
evocation and resolution
of primal fears and fantasies, can function as productive cathartic mechanisms
for our times. The seminar has three major aims: 1) To familiarize
students with
the motivations and implications of family trauma as a theme in film;
2) To study
the ways in which family trauma is repressed or concealed,
remembered, revealed,
dramatized, framed—in short, staged—in contemporary American film;
and 3) To provide students with an introduction to the aesthetics of cinematic
portrayal.
Format: Seminar sessions will consist of short
background lectures,
the viewing and analysis of film clips, and discussion; the last session will
be devoted to group presentations. [In each case students will view the entire
film prior to class in the Hart Hall Video Center.] Outside class students will
be required to read the play, view the five films [Sam Mendes,
American Beauty
(1996), Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia (1999), Sofia Coppola, The
Virgin Suicides (2000), Marc Forster, Monster's Ball
(2001), Clint
Eastwood, Mystic River (2003)], prepare their group presentations, and
of course write their essays. Each student will be required to take part in a
group presentation of ca. 15-20 minutes per group; this may include the acting
out of a scene from one of the films, etc. The other students in the
seminar will
comment on the presentation. A Short paper (five pages) on a topic to
be determined
in consultation with me due Wednesday, June 1. Grading:
Grades will be based on: In-class participation 25%; Group
presentation 25%; Paper
50%.
About the Instructor: Gail Finney has been a
Professor of Comparative
Literature and German at UC Davis since 1988. Her books include
The Counterfeit
Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Women
in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of
the Century,
Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.), and
Christa Wolf.
She is now working on a book entitled Children of Oedipus: Staging Family
Trauma in Contemporary Film.