CMAf07 Comfort Viewing

Filozofická fakulta
podzim 2023
Rozsah
2/0/0. 5 kr. Ukončení: zk.
Vyučující
Richard Andrew Nowell, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (přednášející)
Garance
Mgr. Šárka Jelínek Gmiterková, Ph.D.
Ústav filmu a audiovizuální kultury – Filozofická fakulta
Dodavatelské pracoviště: Ústav filmu a audiovizuální kultury – Filozofická fakulta
Rozvrh
Čt 21. 9. 12:00–13:40 C34, Čt 5. 10. 12:00–13:40 C34, Čt 26. 10. 12:00–13:40 C34, Čt 9. 11. 12:00–13:40 C34, Čt 30. 11. 12:00–13:40 C34, Čt 14. 12. 12:00–13:40 C34
Omezení zápisu do předmětu
Předmět je určen pouze studentům mateřských oborů.

Předmět si smí zapsat nejvýše 20 stud.
Momentální stav registrace a zápisu: zapsáno: 16/20, pouze zareg.: 2/20
Mateřské obory/plány
Cíle předmětu
PLEASE NOTE! The fuller version of the syllabus can be found in the study material in IS. Students enrolled in this course should familiarise themselves with the document, since it contains questions, discussion points and reading materials for each session. The syllabus also introduces five essay prompts in detail.

With hostility routinely directed at filmed entertainment for its alleged aesthetic, political, and moral shortcomings, it is easy to forget that countless films and TV shows are intended primarily to bring us joy. Accordingly, this course offers insights into an extreme manifestation of this culturally important but under-examined phenomenon, now typically known as “Comfort Viewing”. The six sessions comprising the course aim to conceptualize and historicize Comfort Viewing as a calculated content-tailoring strategy, one that aims to generate a combination of themes and audience affects, including uplift, connection, and nostalgia. Students will examine how such phenomena are fostered across a range of case-studies drawn from American media of the last half-century: 1980s Feelgood like E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Metamodernism like Community (2009–15), Nerdom like The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), Tourist Movies like Leap Year (2010), and even Geriaction like Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Through analyses of such case-studies, the course aims to furnish students with transferable concepts and frameworks that promise to enrich their understandings of how and why audiovisual entertainment often tries to make us feel better.
Výstupy z učení
This course uses the case of Comfort Viewing to promote critical and revisionist understandings of audio-visual formats, considering their industrial, aesthetic, and socio-cultural dimensions. The course familiarizes students with transferable frameworks, approaches, and skills that promise to deepen their engagement with media formats on and beyond this course. By the end of the course, students will be expected to demonstrate a capacity to synthesize in argument-driven fashion their engagement of scholarly frameworks and textual and contextual analyses. Their proficiency in such areas shall be assessed with an original essay, one requiring direct engagement with the constitute discourses of Comfort Viewing. All of this requires students develop insights into the following areas:

• Comfort Viewing as a mode of media assembly
• Comfort Viewing and industry practice
• Comfort Viewing and audience targeting
• Comfort Viewing and sociocultural discourses
• Comfort Viewing and revisionist cultural history
• Comfort Viewing and audience engagement
Osnova
  • SESSION 1 THE COMFORT VIEWING MODE 21 SEPTEMBER
  • While Comfort Viewing is typically ascribed to consumer choices – viewers decide what constitutes their own personal Comfort Viewing – it is important to remember that Comfort Viewing is also a form of content-tailoring. This session invites students to consider how the Comfort Viewing Mode summons a cluster of interlocking themes to generate a cluster of themes and audience responses. Conceptualizing Comfort Viewing in this way furnishes students with a flexible and transferable framework in which to imbed their analyses of the five Comfort Viewing case-studies introduced in subsequent sessions.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. Comfort Viewing as a critical category. 2.Comfort Viewing as a mode of media production and assembly.
  • SESSION 2 ‘80s FEELGOOD 5 OCTOBER
  • Comfort viewing may well be relatively new term, but the cluster of discourses and affects that constitute this mode boast a surprisingly long history. Our first case-study therefore focuses on arguably the most high-profile and enduring instance of historical Comfort Viewing: Hollywood’s feelgood cinema of the 1980s. Students consider how this production model was used to support audiences facing life challenges, not least by blurring the lines between the action occurring on the screen and that taking place in front of it.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. The social-cultural relationships of Hollywood’s 1980s feelgood films.
  • 2. The thematic dimensions of these films.
  • 3. The psychosocial ambitions of these films.
  • SESSION 3 METAMODERNISM 26 OCTOBER
  • While postmodern irony and detachment are often considered the dominant cultural mode of recent times, this session suggests a key cultural trend of recent times represents a preeminent form of Comfort Viewing. Widely seen as a response to the hyper-cynical pop culture of the 1990s, Metamodernism combines knowing irony with sincerity, hope, and wonderment. Students will consider its high-profile application to the sitcom and its growing importance to feature films.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. The textual characteristics of Metamodernism.
  • 2. The textuality of Metamodernist media
  • 3. Metamodernism as product differentiation
  • SESSION 4 THE NERD (IN ALL OF US) 9 NOVEMBER
  • The concept of Comfort Viewing can help us better understand the cultural politics of significant amounts of media production. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of a Comfort Viewing type centralizing as subject matter and targeted audience a group of ultra-high investors in entertainment media known oftentimes as nerds (or geeks). While the figure of the nerd is usually imagined as degenerate, students will consider how such media seeks to de-pathologize nerds on the screen and in front of it. In particular, students will consider how emotionally supporting the nerd (in all of us) represents an effort to build a highly lucrative audience segment.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. The dynamics of the nerd/geek.
  • 2. The economics of nerd cultivation.
  • 3. Nerdom as Comfort Viewing
  • SESSION 5 TOURISM 30 NOVEMBER
  • One of the most enduring forms of Comfort Viewing centralizes international travel. These tales of Americans abroad are typically understood as fantasy celebrations of a life abroad, students will consider how this format invites audiences to reflects in different ways on a life at home versus one overseas. In particular, students will consider how such fare promotes tourist media as a tonic to world-weary audience for whom expatriation is unfeasible.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. Tourist movies and fantasies of repatriation.
  • 2. Tourist movies as vacation substitute.
  • 3. Tourist movies as Comfort Viewing.
  • SESSION 6 GERIACTION 14 DECEMBER
  • And lastly, what could be more comforting than a weathered old man with heavy firepower, sharp wit, and … a particular set of skills? This session invites students to use the concept of Comfort Viewing to reimagine one of the most controversial formats of recent times: Geriaction Students consider how and why these action tales of aging blue-collar males are routinely dismissed as reactionary populism, and how the concept of Comfort Viewing enables us to reimagine them as emotionally supportive fantasies for an audience whose status, self-esteem, and belonging has diminished in a rapidly changing world.
  • Targeted Learning Outcomes
  • A sound understanding of:
  • 1. Geriaction as a supposedly reactionary format.
  • 2. The economics of cultivating older viewers.
  • 3. Geriaction as calculated Comfort Viewing.
Literatura
    povinná literatura
  • Frame, Gregory. “Make America Hate Again? The Politics of Vigilante Geriaction”, Journal of Popular Film & Television”, 49.3 (2021): 168–180.
  • Egan, Kate, and Mackley, Kerstin Leder. “The Same Old Song: Exploring Conceptions of the ‘Feelgood’ Film in the Talk of Mamma Mia!’s Older Viewers”. In Mamma Mia! The Movie: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon: London: I.B. Tauris, 2013: 127–144.
  • Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies. Eds. Matthew Tinckom and Amy Villarejo. London, Routledge: 2002.
  • Brown, Noel. “The Feel-Good Film: A Case-Study in Contemporary Genre Classification”, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 32.3 (2015): 269–286.
  • Quail, Christine. “Nerds, Geeks, and the Hip/Square Dialectic in Contemporary Television”, Television and New Media 12.5 (2011): 460–482.
  • Rustad, Gry C., and Schwind, Kai Hanno. “The Joke that Wasn’t Funny Anymore: Reflections on the Metamodern Sitcom”. In Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism. Eds. Robin Van Der Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen. L
Výukové metody
This course is built around six sessions combining elements of both traditional seminars and lectures, with student-focused discussions supported by brief framing, summarizing, and contextual “lecturettes”. As preparation, students are expected to study the provided scholarship and the home screenings in relation to questions included in the syllabus; these will form the basis of discussions, to which students are invited actively to contribute. Such an approach is intended to maximize students’ engagement and comprehension of the learning outcomes for each session.
Whenever possible, the example screenings included on this course should ideally be analyzed in conditions approximating students own favored circumstances of Comfort Viewing, such as in bed with your cat or curled up on the sofa in a beloved hoodie or with their favorite viewing companion.
Metody hodnocení
At the end of the course, students are to submit one circa. 1500–2000-word essay written in response to one of five prompts derived from the topics introduced on the course.

Value: 100% of Final Grade
Due Date: Midnight CET Sunday 14 January 2024
Note: examples screened on this course may NOT be used for final papers.

Advice and Learning Outcomes: Towards the end of the course, an advice sheet will be issued spotlighting the general qualities graded highly on this course. Time will also be set aside towards the end of the final session to discuss these matters.
Vyučovací jazyk
Angličtina
Informace učitele
Dr. Richard Nowell gained his PhD at the University of East Anglia. In his research he focuses on the generative mechanisms underwriting the development of film cycles and textual/thematic trends; the mechanics, motivations, and algorithms of repackaging American genre cinema and the appropriation of popular generic discourse in the assembly and marketing of American cinema. He is a widely published film theorist and historian, author of the book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle and editor of the collection Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema.
Email 516779@mail.muni.cz or richard_nowell@hotmail.com


Office Hours Online, by appointment, at a time of mutual convenience.

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