This blog is for SVA students currently enrolled in Film and Literature CTD-3130-B.

Assignments and announcements will be posted here.

Discussions and comments can be made here.

The course description is as follows:


Accidental Surrealism


In Film and Literature we will explore cinematic sub-genres and back alleys, long-forgotten chambers of the American psyche. Great art masquerading as trash, neglected science fiction, made-for-television masterpieces, “B” pictures… Not to mention scores of educational and industrial films, backfiring, ricocheting, inadvertently revealing otherwise hidden truths about the myths we live by.

Wrong-headed genius cropping up from margin to margin across the U.S. – yes – and yet we also crave art with a capital “A” from around the globe. (Herzog! Epstein! Kinugasa!) Rest assured that, integral to our agenda, monumentally important works abound.

Welcome, too, to obscure and lonely literature. Take our very own “Balzac of the bin,” Jim Knipfel, for example, a writer admired by Thomas Pynchon. Knipfel lives in the borough of Brooklyn, where his Unplugging Philco unfolds, a novel satirizing our post-911 world. The book is steeped in genre-horror movies (Remember C.H.U.D.?) as well as George Orwell’s 1984 – an idiosyncratic nexus of nihilistic humor and paranoid fear.

I hope the course leaves you all profoundly frustrated, utterly confused, not knowing whether to laugh or cry – anything but complacent…


Please purchase the following books immediately:


Jim Knipfel’s Unplugging Philco


John Courier’s Fancies and Goodnights


Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time


Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye