Semester: Fall 2025 Instructor: Professor L. Todisco Screenings: Wednesdays 8:00 PM, Subterranean Annex B / Projection Pit (CRTV-1) Office Hours: Thursdays 2:00–4:00 PM at the Pit (generator permitting)
Course Description:
This course explores a crucial yet overlooked strain of late 20th-century speculative cinema: the cybernetic B-movies of the 1990s home video boom. These films, often dismissed as disposable rental fodder, form a thematically rich, aesthetically distinct, and politically resonant cinematic subcanon. From memory-jacking villains to post-human mercenaries, these films reveal a buried cultural history of our digital anxieties, media hauntologies, and analog desires.
The course positions titles such as Circuitry Man, Hologram Man, and Digital Man within the broader discourse of film studies, media theory, speculative realism, and late-capitalist mythopoesis.
We will engage with critical texts by Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Marshall McLuhan, and Kodwo Eshun, while viewing films not on DCP or Blu-ray, but on tape, CRT, and memory.
Required Viewings
All films will be screened on physical media (VHS or 16mm when available), projected via analog rig. Attendance is mandatory unless excused due to detainment by rogue cybernetic entities.
Week
Film
Theme
1
Circuitry Man (1990)
Eco-Decay, Neural Romance, The Plughead Principle
2
Circuitry Man II: Plughead Rewired (1994)
Data Possession and the Technognostic Trickster
3
Hologram Man (1995)
Light Beings, Digital Fascism, and the Spectral State
4
Digital Man (1995)
Military Memory Loops and Synthetic Sentience
Assignments
Midterm Essay (7–10 pages): Plughead as Archetype: Deconstructing the Cybernetic Trickster
Final Project (choose one): A) Academic paper (15–20 pages) analyzing a film not screened in class from the Video Cyberpunk canon B) Analog Artifacts Project: Create a short VHS-era film or zine tracing your own post-human cinematic lineage C) Lecture-performance held in the Pit, max 15 minutes, using tape decks, static feedback, and spoken word
Weekly Response Papers: 1 page minimum, typed or typewritten, Xeroxed and filed into the Department of Post-Cinematic Hauntings.
Grading Breakdown
Participation (including generator maintenance): 20%
Weekly Responses: 20%
Midterm Paper: 25%
Final Project: 35%
Course Ethos
“The future was taped over. We rewind to remember.”
Suggested Supplementals
Hardware (1990, Dir. Richard Stanley)
Mindwarp (1992, Fangoria Films)
The Vindicator (1986, Canadian proto-Digital Man)
Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996, direct from the gutter)
CyberZone (1995, when Blockbuster was the frontier)
⚠️ DISCLAIMER:
This course may cause identity fragmentation, analog addiction, or visions of Plughead in your REM cycles. Proceed with open wires and a rewound soul.
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