Boredom and Suspense
Cooper Union, Spring 2024
Monday, 9am-12:50pm
Rm 530F/539F
Instructor: Thomas Beard
thomas.beard@cooper.edu

The central question of this course: How might an artist, working with film and video, use attention as a kind of material? The answers—and there are many—will be explored on several fronts, with production exercises buttressed by discussions of relevant readings, ranging from classic philosophical accounts of boredom and suspense to contemporary psychological research on the subjects. We will also watch and analyze a wide variety of films, spanning the breadth of cinema’s global history, both exemplars of suspense as well as works that challenge one’s received understanding of narrative intrigue and anticipation (there are, I should note, no boring films or videos on this syllabus). Some readings will be merely recommended, others required; as for the films, some may be examined as excerpts, others viewed in full. The lessons to be drawn from these materials will be internalized through a rather old-fashioned form of art pedagogy: copying.

Your main project for the semester will be to select a particularly suspenseful scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film and recreate it. Though unlike, say, the French Academy of the nineteenth century, how one goes about that copying is entirely up to the student, and the effort may yield, in one instance, a careful and precise facsimile of an iconic sequence, or, in another, a blistering critique of the parent material. The goal, in either case, is for the practice of restaging to be a means through which the student can better understand the myriad aesthetic decisions that constitute the film they are copying—at the level of sound design, editing, camera movement, mise en scène, and performance.

Grading—a dubious enterprise, though an institutional requirement—will be determined by only two factors, your participation in class and your final project, which will hold equal weight.

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January 16

Introductions

Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954)
Sally Potter, Thriller (1979)

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January 22

Bring Your Own Suspense

Reading: John Berryman, “Dream Song #14”

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January 29

Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Reading: William James, “The Perception of Time”

Project proposals due.

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February 5

Akira Kurosawa, High and Low (1963)

Reading: Noël Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense”

Project timelines due.

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February 12

Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie, The Perils of Pauline (1914)
Lucrecia Martel, The Headless Woman (2008)

Reading: Selection from Hitchcock/Truffaut

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February 26

Paulino Viota, Contactos (1970)
Kevin Jerome Everson, Erie (2010)

Reading: Patricia Highsmith, “Suspense in Fiction”

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March 4

Kamal Amrohi, Mahal (1949)

Reading: Anna Laetitia Aikin and John Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment”

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March 11

Suspense (radio drama, 1940-1962)
Tewfik Saleh, The Dupes (1972)

Reading: Guy Hennebelle, Khemaïs Khayati, “A Cinema of Unveiling, A Cinema of Awareness: An Interview with Tewfik Saleh”

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March 25

Midway Reviews

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April 1

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Daratt (Dry Season), 2006
Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, Modest Livelihood, 2012

Reading: Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger”

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April 8

Lois Weber, Suspense, 1913
Anne McGuire, Strain Andromeda The, 1992

Reading: Adam Phillips, “On Being Bored”

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April 15

Thom Andersen, Melting, 1965
James Benning, RR, 2007

Reading: Søren Kierkegaard, “Rotation of Crops”

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April 22

Andy Warhol, Eat, 1964
John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971

Reading: Walter Benjamin, [Boredom, Eternal Return], from The Arcades Project

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April 29

Final Presentations

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May 6

Final Presentations (continued)