This is the website for Dr. Thomas' Thought and Image course for Spring 2017 at SFSU. A comparative study of the films of Douglas Sirk, Todd Haynes, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder with the social theory of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.
I considered the homes that people live in exactly described their lives. They are always behind window crossings, behind bars or staircases. Their homes are their prisons —Douglas Sirk
I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures and so forth . . . but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses —Giorgio Agamben
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images —Guy Debord