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COLT 212 - Comparative World Cinema

Instructor: Maya Larson

Term: Winter 2019

Mermaid Cinema

Since first splashing into film in Georges Méliès’ 1904 La Siréne, the mermaid continues to lure moviegoers to cinema’s shores. Inhabitant of the liminal zone between land and sea, human and animal, insider and outsider, purity and profanity, fertility and death, the mermaid reflects the ambivalence of her fluid element. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze notes, water’s “vivid presence” in early cinema was “benevolent as well as devastating.” A creature of both water and film, the mermaid is emblematic of the cinematic image itself. Mindful of literary evocations of water spirits and the liminal, this course will examine the mermaid and her variations (mer-man, rusalka, ondine, water witch) in films such as The Mermaid (Hong Kong, 1965), The Little Mermaid (Czechoslovakia, 1976/U.S., 1989), Rusalka (Czechoslovakia, 1977), Hugo (U.S., 2011), Ondine (Ireland, 2009), Mei ren yu (Hong Kong, 2016), The Shape of Water (U.S., 2018), and Aquaman (U.S., 2018).

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

  • Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
  • Multicultural Courses: International Cultures (IC)