Previous | Next
 |
Joshua Clover
English
Email: jclover@ucdavis.edu |
My teaching interest is in popular film, in titles and traditions which seem of a piece with what's most blindingly notable about movies: their status as the exemplary popular art of modernity. Because these movies talk to big groups, I am interested in films that think about the fundamental problems of big groups, rather than the struggles of heroic or troubled individuals. But can Hollywood do this? Sometimes, and not always on purpose. I like thinking about movies that seem intentionally or accidentally canny about the constructed nature of our own social reality, about the ways that ideology shapes our social existence while remaining invisible - in much the way the camera frames a constructed reality while hiding in plain sight. Recent or future courses include a Film Genres course that studied class conflict within the frame of the "teen comedy"; and an Introduction to Film Studies featuring films about films and image-making. In many ways these interests coalesce in the "edge of the construct" film, in which characters struggle to discover whether they live in the real world or some falsified reality designed to keep them in bondage -- a concept developed while working on my book, The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2005). In addition to teaching in the Department of English, I have an ongoing column for Film Quarterly, "Marx & Coca-Cola."