| WEEK
1 (October 6, 8)
a. Seminar: Different ways of experiencing space
Screening: Paris qui dort
b. Seminar: Temporal simultaneity and spatial orientation
Read: Tom Conley, “Icarian Cinema”
WEEK 2 (October 13, 15)
a. Seminar: Walking in the city
Screening: The Red Balloon (also excerpts from The Flight
of the Red Balloon)
Read: de Certeau, “Walking in the City”
b. Assignment presentations: capturing the present
Choose a site that offers, in your view, an experience of the present
— that is, that tries to capture the present time. Explain how
the space captures the present
WEEK 3 (October 20, 22)
a. Seminar: The city in fast-forward
Screening: Breathless
Read for today: Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
b. Assignment presentations: following visual clues
Choose a site that calls, in your view, for the walking visitor to follow
a specific trajectory. Explain the nature of the visual signs that direct
the viewer and their purpose. Is their goal achieved, or do people veer
of the intended path? Why?
WEEK 4 (October 27, 29)
a. Seminar: spaces of circulation
Screening: Cleo from 5 to 7 (also excerpts from The 400
Blows)
Read: selection from Donald, Imagining the Modern City
b. Assignment presentation: the distortion of temporal flow
Choose a site that offers, in your view, an experience that distorts
temporal flow – slows it down, makes it faster, reverses it, etc.
Explain how the space distorts time.
WEEK 5 (November 2)
a. Seminar: the modernization of Paris in the late 19th century
Read: Clark, “The View from Notre-Dame”
WEEK 6 (November 8, 10, 12)
a. Assignment presentation: crowds
Choose a site that encourages, in your view, people-watching. Explain
how the space is
designed to allow interaction with the crowd and to what effects.
b. Seminar: the city of high modernism
Screening: Play Time
Read: - Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower”; Laurent Marie, “Jacques
Tati’s Play Time as New Babylon”
c. Assignment presentation: historical palimpsest
Choose a site that retains traces of the controversy about Haussmann’s
city plan. Explain how the space conveys the controversial aspects,
and in what form these vestiges have been preserved today.
WEEK 7 (November 17, 19)
a. Seminar: the city of immigrants
Screening: La haine
Read: Tom Conley, “Cronos, Cosmos, and Polis”
b. Assignment presentation: non-places
Choose a site that is more space than place, that is, where the local
culture seems flattened to allow for global flow of materials, people,
and ideas. What enables the flattening effect? What is lost and gained
in the process?
WEEK 8 (November 24, 26)
a. Seminar: Paris outside its own borders
Screening: What Time Is It There?
Read: Verena Conley, "Electronic Paris from Place of Election to
Place of Ejection"; Marc Augé, "Paris and the Ethnography
of the Contemporary World"
b. Assignment presentation: immigrant spaces
Choose a site where the presence of immigrants is highly visible. Explain
how this space is different from spaces we have discussed so far: how
does it affect patterns of walking, temporal perceptions, etc.?
WEEK 9 (December 1, 3)
a. Seminar: Paris in the tourist’s eye
Screening: Excerpt from Paris je t’aime
b. Final presentation: Choose 3 sites or aspects of the city
that you watched differently when you have just arrived in Paris. Present
your thoughts to class in three slide pairs conveying the before/after
effect.
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