“The Wild” Honors Seminar Proposal: Spring 2015

Dr. Luke Harmon and Dr. Matthew Wappett

Background: Based upon the feedback we received regarding our past Honors Seminar, “Unnatural Obsessions”, we have reevaluated our approach and focus. As a result we have eliminated the weekly “theme hopping” and have decided to focus the course on one general theme that will have broad applicability to the students’ lives. Although students liked the variety represented in the weekly themes/ethical questions, we found that they readily gravitated towards making personal connections with the film narratives that formed the core of the class content.

Course Objectives: The primary objective for this Honors seminar will focus on interrogating the relationship between (wo)man and the “wild”. This course will utilize the medium of cinema as our window for analysis into how we, as a culture, portray our relationship to the wild and how we navigate our individual journeys through the wild in the world without and the wild within each of us. Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey and the power of mythology will form the primary theoretical lens for the class.

A secondary aim of the class is to familiarize students with basic film criticism and provide them with additional tools to understand the role cinema plays in the construction of our individual and collective identity. We will watch one film every week in class. In the interest of helping students become familiar with various directorial styles we have decided to structure the course around paired films from a select set of seminal directors. We hope that this structure will provide students with the opportunity to engage in a more rich dialogue about the influence of the director on the stylistic preferences displayed through the narrative and artistic direction of the film.

The course will be taught once a week for a 3-3.5 hours block. Each class session will begin by watching a film, and the last part of class will be spent analyzing and critiquing the films viewed the week prior. We feel that it is imperative that the films be viewed as a group to re-capture the social experience of cinema and to allow for discussion and analysis as the films are being watched. This was a very powerful aspect of our previous seminar and is an element that we would like to continue.

This course will be co-taught by Luke Harmon from the Dept. of Biology and Matthew Wappett from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (I don’t know where my final appointment will be, so this is general for now). This course will meet for 3 hours every week.

Proposed Readings:

  • Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. D. (1988).The power of myth. New York: Doubleday. (Required)

We will consider two additional readings from this list (with an aim to achieve gender equity):

  • Coates, T. (2009).The beautiful struggle : A father, two sons and an unlikely road to manhood(1st ed.). New York: Spiegel & Grau.
  • Rawicz, S. (2006).The long walk : The true story of a trek to freedom(New ed.). New York :Garsington: Lyons ; Windsor [distributor].
  • Strayed, C. (2012).Wild : From lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail(1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • McCairen, P. (1998).Canyon solitude : A woman's solo river journey through Grand Canyon. Seattle, Wash.: Seal Press.

Activities & Assignments:

  1. Participation: Attendance during the weekly class sessions will be mandatory.
  1. Outdoor “Into the Wild” Experience: We are working with the UI Outdoor Rec Program to try and structure an actual “into the wild” experience with the students enrolled in this class. Our intent is to take them on a 3-4 day backpacking / raft trip that will take them outside of their comfort zone and require them to confront the issues raised in the class head-on. Students will be required to keep a reflective journal during this experience that will inform their final project. Students who are unable to participate in this activity will be given an alternative and equivalent assignment.
  1. Final Film (200 points): Students will be required to work in groups of 2-3 to make a short 5-10 minute film that deals with one of the themes discussed in class. This assignment will be broken up into several sub-assignments that will be due throughout the semester as follows:

Film proposal (due Feb 26)

Script (Mar 26)

Storyboards (April 9)

Final Film (May 7)

Final films will be viewed and graded together as a class during our scheduled final time. We will hand out more detailed and explicit guidelines for this assignment during the second week of class.

“The Wild” Master Movie List (final selections will be made from this list)

Film & Director list:

  • Carroll Ballard
  • Never Cry Wolf
  • The Black Stallion
  • Akira Kurosawa
  • Ran
  • DersuUzala
  • Werner Herzog
  • Aguirre
  • Grizzly Man
  • Happy People
  • Lars von Trier
  • Dancer in the Dark
  • The Idiots
  • Antichrist
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Rope
  • The Birds
  • Vertigo
  • Marnie
  • Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Solaris
  • Ivan's Childhood
  • Zhang Yimou
  • To Live
  • Hero
  • George Romero
  • Dawn of the Dead
  • Night of the Living Dead
  • Jan Svankmajer
  • Lunacy
  • Little Otik
  • David Cronenberg
  • The Fly
  • Videodrome
  • eXistenZ

General Films to consider:

  • Atanarjuat
  • Kekexili
  • Valhalla Rising
  • Salaam Bombay!
  • Into the Wild
  • Alive!
  • The Road
  • Children of Men
  • Mad Max
  • Blair Witch Project
  • Apocalypto
  • The African Queen
  • Deliverance
  • Jeremiah Johnson
  • Restrepo
  • The Hurt Locker
  • How the West Was Won
  • Rabbit-Proof Fence
  • Whalerider
  • Pan’s Labyrinth
  • Holy Motors
  • Easy Rider
  • The Searchers
  • Taxi Driver
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • The Fox and the Hound
  • Human Planet
  • Jacob’s Ladder