Syllabus
Schedule:
I. Monday, October 2: Welles the Adapter: An Artist Across Media
II. Monday, October 23: Welles the Mass Media Artist: Radio and Television
III.Monday, October 30: Welles the Hollywood Filmmaker: Citizen Kane to Pulp Thrillers
IV. Monday, November 6: Welles the Independent Auteur
V. Monday, November 13: Welles’s Career and Afterlife as a Multi Media Artist
VI.Monday, November 20: Welles Wrap Up and Final Exam
Annotation
MASTERING MULTIPLE MEDIA: The CAREER of ORSON WELLES What makes a great artist across the media? In a culture that expects sophisticated storytellers to go from one medium to another, this course covers the career of one of the first masters of multiple media—Orson Welles. To gain the most from Welles’s achievements in the previous century, this seminar explores both his artistic methods and the contexts that made his methods so innovative and influential. The class uses Welles’s career to examine key issues in transmedia artistry, including: the most fruitful ways of adapting literary works from one medium to another, the conditions that open the media industries to innovative work, how to extend the conventions of media genres, how media personalities can reinvent themselves and the creative patterns that produce an enduring legacy across art forms. Each session will bring new illuminations and insights for both media scholars and media-makers. At the end of the class, students will have the option either to write an essay or to plan a project that adapts Welles’s multi-media innovations to contemporary mass entertainment.
Readings: (I) Readings: Online materials from the Works Progress Administration; Excerpts from Shakespeare plays including the Henriad trilogy and Othello; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Robert Stam, Literature through Film; Michael Denning Orson Welles, Shakespeare + Popular Culture; Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas, Orson Welles at Work (II) Readings: Bram Stoker Dracula; H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds; John Caldwell, Production Culture, Robert J. Brown, Manipulating the Ether.; Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtain, The Revolution Wasn’t Televised, William Boddy, Fifties Television, various articles (III): Readings: Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles, Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust, Bradley Schauer, “First-Run and Cut-Rate,” Welles’s Memo to Universal about the editing of Touch of Evil (online) (IV): Readings: Michel de Montaigne, Essays (online), Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film (V): Readings: Joseph McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles, Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Battle over Orson Welles” (online), other articles.