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Instructor: Walter Metz
Spring 2007
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Download as PDF (43 K)
Syllabus last updated: January 26, 2007.
Meeting Times
Wednesdays, 2:10-5:00pm in Cheever Hall, Room 13
Information About the Instructor
Walter Metz, an Associate Professor and Interim Department Head in the Department of Media and Theatre Arts, holds an S.B. in Materials Science and Engineering from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Texas at Austin.
Walter’s Contact Info
Course Description
MTA 506 fulfils a 1st year requirement for the M.F.A. degree in Science and Natural History Filmmaking at MSU. The primary goal of the course is to provide an advanced introduction to the critical methodologies necessary for intelligently interrogating the representations of natural history, science, and technology in print and media. The critical methods deployed by the course will be derived from the history and philosophy of science (Thomas Kuhn), critical theory (Jacques Derrida), and the contemporary field of the humanities known as “science studies” (Andrew Ross, Donna Haraway, et al).
This course argues for the simultaneous understanding of both the profound achievements of science and a healthy skepticism of science’s inherent limitations. A reading of the popular literature on science will help establish these positions: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996) serves as an accessible defense of science in a culture embracing irrationalism, while Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather illustrates how and why the core methodological practice of contemporary science—the scientific method—is subject to ideological critique.
The course divides scientific discourse into three philosophical camps: positivism, idealism, and realism (or historical materialism). An investigation of these terms, via their major practitioners (such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn), will allow students in the course to analyze the different ways of representing science and its cultural significance. These philosophical contributions, particularly those of Thomas Kuhn, will allow us to analyze critical case studies in the history of science. For example, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn implies that a scientific revolution (“a paradigm shift”) occurs not necessarily because the scientific community comes to be overwhelmed by new facts assaulting the old paradigm, but because of the elegance through which the new paradigm re-assembles the old facts. His example for this is, of course, the Copernican Revolution, but we will also study other key scientific discoveries that illuminate the complex interactions between science and culture.
Such historical material will allow us to pursue the extent to which we believe that science is inherently deformed by ideology. We will engage such an exploration in which ideology directly contaminated scientific practices via a reading of Richard Levins’ and Richard Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist. However, we will also push beyond these obvious examples to, for example, contemporary American culture where science is molded according to the (il)logic of the academic and corporate marketplaces.
These challenges to both irrationalism and science as unassailable discourses will allow the course to engage in applied criticism. Here, we will discuss the various ways of conveying scientific information to an audience comprised largely of non-scientists. We will pursue this project by examining an array of books which, over the past 30 years, have attempted to popularize science and the scientific method: for example, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Throughout, we will analyze films and television programs that attempt to adapt this popularization of science to mass-mediated art forms: for example, “Ask Mr. Wizard,” “NOVA,” “Cosmos,” Errol Morris’ A Brief History of Time, “Connections,” “National Geographic Explorer,” and the various shows on The Discovery Channel.
The course thus attempts to introduce a number of sites of concern to fledgling science and natural history filmmakers. We begin by posing questions about what science is, how science is done, and why it is done that way. We then introduce students to key historical moments in the history of science in which many of these issues are complexly framed. This will encourage students both to consider the philosophical concerns these historical sites raise as well as to think about science and nature filmmaking in more historical terms. We conclude with a practical interrogation of how science has been popularly represented to get students thinking about what new and innovative strategies need to be developed to compellingly, provocatively, and coherently represent science, technology, and natural history in the visual media of film and television.
Most crucially, the field of science studies will encourage students to develop critical tools to see how generically bound and conventional natural history and science filmmaking has been, and continues to be. If the course—indeed, if the M.F.A. program itself is successful—no longer will science programs produced by our students replicate traditional narrative gestures (about gender, about race, about capitalism, for example) which have for so long plagued the attempts to deliver scientific information to a mass audience.
Experimental Cinema: A Teaching Experiment
The biggest critique of this course has historically been that it is “all so very interesting” (sometimes offered seriously, sometimes with a healthy level of sarcasm!), but does not apply at all to the pragmatic matters of becoming real-life filmmakers. As my expertise is in film studies, I think the best way to address this disconnect between high theory and the practical matters of production is to watch and analyze movies using the tools we are encountering in the course. Furthermore, since the goal of this class is to use science studies to expand the domain of what natural history and science films are ordinarily concerned with, we need filmmaking models of how to re-invent the cinema. These models are, of course, mostly located in the mode of experimental cinema.
Required Texts
Graded Course Assignments
Experimental Film #1 25%
Final Exam 35%
Experimental Film #2 40%
Weekly Schedule
E-Reserves: To access the articles on E-Reserve, you must know your Banner ID (One-Card #) and the last 4 digits of your Social Security Number.
Wednesday, January 24
Topic Introduction to the Course: Re-inventing Science Filmmaking
Critical Theory for Science Filmmakers [Disk #1]
Reading John Wilson, “The Nature and Variety of Social Theory” {reserves}
Wednesday, January 31
Topic A Crash Course in Film Aesthetics [Disks #2-7]
Reading Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction
Wednesday, February 7
Topic Experimental Cinema: A Model for Re-invention
Science Film and the Avant-garde [Disk #8]
Reading P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde
Wednesday, February 14
Topic A Brief History of Critical Theory [Disk #9]
Reading Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” {reserves}
Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reprod.” {reserves}
Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinema. Apparatus” {reserves}
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” {reserves}
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature [excerpt] {reserves}
Wednesday, February 21
Topic The Radical Turn: Contemporary Science Studies [Disk #10]
Reading David Hess, Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction
Wednesday, February 28
Topic Science vs. the Humanities: Towards a Better Future
The Dialectical Biologist [Disk #10a]
Reading C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Egg and the Sperm” {reserves}
Carl Gardner and Robert Young, “Science on TV: A Critique” {reserves}
Roger Silverstone, “Narrative Strategies in Television Science” {reserves}
Hannah Landecker, “Cellular Features” {reserves}
Levins and Lewontin, “The Problem of Lysenkoism” {reserves}
Wednesday, March 7
Topic Cultural Studies of Science and Technology [Disk #11]
Reading Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
Andrew Ross, “The Drought This Time” {reserves}
James Carey, “Technology and Ideology” {reserves}
Wednesday, March 14
No Classes: Spring Break
Wednesday, March 21
Screening of 1st Experimental Film Project
Wednesday, March 28
Special event: For the first hour of today’s class, Dr. Georgina Montgomery, historian of science, will discuss gender and race issues using literature on Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall with respect to film and magazine articles in National Geographic, with emphasis on the ways in which the indigenous researchers were made invisible in these representations. This will enable an analysis of power structures in science and the media.
Topic Critical Theory and Science Studies: Two Examples
Reading Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now” {reserves}
Evelyn Fox Keller, “From Secrets of Death to Secrets of Life” {reserves}
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions [excerpts] {reserves}
Wednesday, April 4
Topic Interdisciplinary Opportunities: Sociology
Reading Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life
Wednesday, April 11
Topic Interdisciplinary Opportunities: Art History
Reading Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art
Special Event:
Tuesday, April 17
Stage Reading: Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
7pm in the SUB Theatre
Performers: Stephanie Campbell, Joel Jahnke, and Tom Watson
MTA 506 students are required to attend this performance
Wednesday, April 18
Topic Literature and Science
Reading Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Wednesday, April 25
Screening of 2nd Experimental Film Project
Wednesday, May 2
Screening of 2nd Experimental Film Project
Course Evaluations
Final Exam
Thursday, May 10: 6:00-7:50pm in Cheever Hall, Room 131
Citations for Reserves Articles
Click Here to Return to the Homepage of Walter Metz
This page was last updated on January 26, 2007
Questions or comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-7588 or send an e-mail to: metz@montana.edu
Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman