Please describe your project
This HST 303 course, Information Literacy and Film and History, is intended as a conversation, debate, and analysis of the social politics and ideology of American cinema (case in point: the socially engaged film) and the representation of American history from the 1900s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The discourse of the class will in some part focus on two themes: first, how socially engaged cinema and documentaries played a significant role in shaping narrative cinema languages and formal conventions in American history. Second, film’s ideological power to shape the audience’s conceptions of American identity and its mediation of the audience’s social attitudes.

The course is not intended to be a complete or linear history of America’s social presence in the commercial and independent narrative cinema and documentary. Indeed, the thematic divisions of the course are not intended to suggest a natural unity inherent in the body of films. Rather, the divisions are intended to suggest those ideas that most consistently informed Film and History during the 1900s to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The fundamental premise upon which this class rests is informed by the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This passage, from the Declaration of Independence, is the central idea of the American experiment and will be the foundation for the conversations and debates examined in this class.

The debates in this class offer a lens on how different voices and viewpoints, through American cinema and film have shaped public opinion in modern American history. That is to say, I have selected films for this class, which have consciously attempted some sort of dialogue with the pressing issues and social forces that mobilized America’s most active political formations.