Instructor:
Kalani Michell
This course focuses on the transnational films by the German-Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch (1892- 1947), who immigrated to Hollywood in 1922. While the idea of a “Lubitsch touch” has long guided interpretations of films he directed, this course seeks to move beyond vague, tautological authorial categories. Students will engage with a broader body of film and media theory to understand how these silent comedies, historical dramas, musicals and romantic and political comedies are never stable, intact works, but always dispersed and fragmented through the reception process that, especially in this case, occurs on both sides of the Atlantic. Taught in English.