English 24

Description

We will watch and discuss three masterworks of world art cinema: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (Japan, 1950), Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (Italy, 1968), and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Iran, 1997). Each is a kind of parable of repetition, involving the serial recurrence, over and over again, of a key plot-event. In Rashomon, a crime is recounted separately by each of the participants; in Teorema, a mysterious visitor proceeds to have sex with one after another member of a bourgeois family; and in Taste of Cherry, a man persists in asking a succession of men to bury him after his suicide. We will reflect on the different meanings of seriality and repetition in the three films. No background but your interest is required.