ENGL120 - Cinema and Culture - "Cinema of Logistics" - CRN: 19246 - Summer Session II - MWF 12:00PM-1:40PM - ONLINE
Quarantined at home, we’ve ordered online and have had boxes delivered to our door. In the first year of the pandemic, Amazon saw record profits and Bezos (“Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos”) added nearly $70 billion to his net worth. The news blares, now, about a supply chain in crisis. And when we are increasingly met with “out of stock” notifications and delivery delays, it is often “the supply chain” that gets the blame. Of the many things ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic, a new attention to the global supply chain has transformed the logistical systems animating global supply from the mundane to the meme-d.
How can film help us understand logistics—and what’s at stake?
In this class we will unpack depictions of global supply and logistics in film. We will inventory the crises, paradigms of security, uses of law, and cultural representations of logistics. We will map the network of infrastructures, technologies, and sites of global logistics, and will deliver—just in time for the end of the summer semester—critical analyses of logistics in works which construct, congest, pack, pirate, jam, and hack logistics networks. We will engage with films including Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, among others.
This course counts for the following General Education Core requirements: Creative Arts course, and Individual and Society course.
