Film, Welfare, Capitalism, and the State

This course focuses on the material and ideological connections between films and the political-economic systems in which they are produced. We will take a close look at the relationship between films, the nation-state, and various economic systems from the Nordic welfare model to global neoliberal capitalism. During this course, we will analyze films that discuss and portray the beginning of the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, the formation of the social welfare state in the Nordic countries, and the height of the imperial-capitalist world-domination of the present-day United States. Some of the questions we’ll be asking include: How have films reflected on and contributed to the formation of various economic and state-systems? What kind of political changes have films advocated for, and how  powerful can they be in igniting social change? How have cinematic techniques and particularly economic and nationalist themes traveled, translated, and been adapted in various national-linguistic contexts?