How do stories influence our understanding of politics? What role do state actors play in shaping the cinematic narratives we see on screen? This course will introduce students to the field of political science by placing American and international films in conversation with scholarship on power, politics, and storytelling. Each week we will study a film, read related research, and analyze how one informs our understanding of the other.

For example, to illuminate social science on political machines in urban politics we might watch Street Fight (dir. Marshall Curry, 2005), a documentary about the 2002 mayoral race in Newark between incumbent Sharpe James and challenger Cory Booker (now a Senator representing New Jersey). To shed light on issues of political violence we might watch The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), a documentary about mass killings in Indonesia.

The course will cover ethnic politics, broadly conceived with a particular focus on social movements, protests, civil disobedience and political violence. Related topics may include immigration, crime and the state, and urban politics. We will consider a range of questions including, how do stories influence our sense of self, community and nation? How do filmmaking techniques (e.g. cinematography, casting, sound design) influence which people and issues become salient? How do aesthetic and narrative choices affect attitudes about the social order and who is deserving of power? Through close readings of films, social science, and media studies scholarship, this course will enable students to study key political science concepts, the institution of media, and how stories make meaning. In particular, the following themes will be addressed:

• Hierarchy and myth
  How do stories influence our attitudes about society and who is deserving of power? How do camera angles, lighting, scripts, editing and other aspects of film craft inform our sense of who is central to a narrative and who is peripheral? Social psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto (1999) argue that all societies are organized, in part, through stories or myths that strengthen or weaken existing inequalities. We will look at how films present “hierarchy enhancing” or “hierarchy attenuating” myths that may play an important role in legitimizing or delegitimizing stratified social orders.

• Culture as law
  How do cultural institutions shape human behavior? How do formal rules, such as laws, and informal rules, such as norms, structure and guide human action? Anthropologist and law professor Sally Falk Moore (2005), argued that culture “often [has] the force of law.” Similarly, lawyer and professor Thomas Stoddard (1997) argued that social progress requires both “rule shifts” and “culture shifts.” Along these lines, we will examine films and the larger film industry as cultural institutions that shape, reflect and reify society’s ideas, values, and conventions.

• Seeing the state
  Though locations are typically just silent backgrounds, in many films the setting often serves as “an extra character” (Gladwell 2006). In a similar vein, for this course, we will consider the role that state actors, government policies and political institutions play as often unseen “characters” shaping the on-screen narrative. Further, we will consider how making such policies visible, might change our understanding of film’s themes, plot lines and character development as well as the policies themselves.