Gideon Burton's Blog

Course at BYU in Mormons and Film

I've just been approved to teach a course this Winter semester (Jan-April, 2008) in BYU's Theatre and Media Arts department entitled "Mormons and Film: The First Century" (click on image to the left for full-sized flier). The online syllabus can be found here. I'm very excited about this. I'm adapting Randy Astle's syllabus from a few years back, adding to it readings from the special issue of BYU Studies on Mormons and Film that he and I edited for 2007.

There is so little knowledge about the history of Mormons and film, and there are so many interesting and important films (whether by or about Mormons--see the Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database which tallies some 4000 such films). This course will help to promote Mormon cinematic cultural literacy and hopefully spark some good research and criticism about these largely unstudied works.

Graduate Course in Cinematic Rhetoric

I will be teaching a course in cinematic rhetoric in Spring 2008 at Brigham Young University. The preliminary syllabus follows. Feedback is welcome:

Overview
This course will focus not on rhetoric or discourse about film, but the rhetoric of film–the structure and function of cinematic form and its aesthetic and social influence. Using both historical and contemporary theoretical models for interpreting both static and moving images (see list of texts and contexts), students will be invited to explore and apply the rhetoric of cinema in its various contexts. This will include examining film as a persuasive medium that plays ideological, commercial, and normative acculturating roles; looking at films as rhetorical texts with their own structure and complex multimedia grammar (language, iconography, narrative); and examining the peculiar and evolving phenomenology of film as movies are now multipurposed and more diversely experienced through the digital media. Along the way we will look at comparisons between the pragmatic methods of composing texts and making films; film as translation (the rhetoric of adaptation), and film as spiritual rhetoric (rhetorical methods for representing or invoking the sacred).