Results for FILMSTUD

Formal, historical, and cultural issues in the study of film. Classical narrative cinema compared with alternative narrative structures, documentary films, and experimental cinematic forms. Issues of cinematic language and visual perception, and representations of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Aesthetic and conceptual analytic skills with relevance to cinema.

This course familiarizes students with various elements of film language (cinematography, editing, sound, etc.) and introduces them to a range of approaches to cinematic analysis (authorship, genre, close formal reading, socio-historical considerations). Different types of films (narrative, documentary, and experimental) will be surveyed. Classical narrative cinema will be compared with alternative modes of story-telling.

Media beyond the horizon of cinema and television present unique problems of definition and analysis. Taking the digital - information represented as discrete values - as a reasonable approximation of the mechanics and fantasies of computation, course surveys theoretical approaches to code, networks, and cyberculture. Taking familiar formations like web sites and video games as objects by which to learn how thinkers have understood and envisioned emerging media from the mid-20th century to the present. Students to develop own methodological tools for becoming more critical users of digital media. COMM 1B can be taken in substitution of FILMSTUD 6 when the course is not being offered.

Television is arguably the most influential and ubiquitous mass medium of the last half century. Because of its familiarity and popularity, it is also often the medium most overlooked, dismissed, and maligned. Drawing from the history of television and of television scholarship, this course builds a theoretical framework for understanding this pivotal cultural form. Course covers interdisciplinary approaches to studying TV texts, TV audiences, and TV industries, including questions of the boundaries of television (from independent and avant-garde video to convergence). In the process students develop methodological tools as critical television viewers.

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.

From the rise of the French New Wave to the present.

The close analysis of film. Emphasis is on formal and narrative techniques in structure and style, and detailed readings of brief sequences. Elements such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, composition, sound, and performance. Films from various historical periods, national cinemas, directors, and genres. Prerequisite: FILMSTUD 4 or equivalent. Recommended: ARTHIST 1 or FILMSTUD 102. Course can be repeated twice for a max of 8 units.

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4.

How are movies created? How are scripts developed and selected for production? How are films actually made and marketed? How are they shown in various media? Who decides what in all of these processes and what information do the decision-makers rely on?nnThis course will follow the life cycle of a movie, from its inception as an idea, article, book, etc., to its release in theaters and other media as a finished product. Guest speakers will discuss the evolution of the film industry, creative development of scripts, how deals are structured to acquire intellectual property, film finance, and how movies are physically produced and then marketed, distributed and exhibited in theaters and in other media. We will use two films as case studies ¿ The Chronicles of Narnia ¿ Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Chasing Mavericks.

Science fiction film's sense of wonder depends upon the development and revelation of new ways of seeing. The American science fiction film emphasizes the fundamental activity of human perception, its relation to bodily experience and the exploration of other worlds, new cities, and other modes of being, in such new technological spaces as the cyberspaces of the information age. It is perhaps the Hollywood genre most directly concerned with the essence of cinema itself.

Preference to freshmen. From its beginnings, the cinema evinced an affinity with the phantom realm of specters, ghosts, and supernatural beings. Not only does horror have deep and diverse roots in the international history of film; it emerges as a trope of film itself, as a medium of shadows, dematerialized presence, life drained of substance. Overview of filmic imaginations of horror with a focus on the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Theories of horror, from the fantastic to the uncanny; unpacking these in light of key moments in the genre's development. The merits of vampires versus zombies. Ongoing debates through the lens of horror about cinematic representation, from Andre Bazin's idea of the mummy complex to Linda Williams' thesis of body genres to Jeffrey Sconce's notion of haunted media. Introduction to film analysis and interpretation; no prior experience in film studies required. Required weekly screening.

The modern medium of comics, a history that spans 150 years. The flexibility of the medium encountered through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, journalism, and autobiography. Innovative creators including McCay, Kirby, Barry, Ware, and critical writings including McCloud, Eisner, Groenstee. Topics include text/image relations, panel-to-panel relations, the page, caricature, sequence, seriality, comics in the context of the fine arts, and relations to other media.

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

New film cultures and movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China in the 80s. Key directors including Jia Zhangke, Wu Wenguang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui. Topics include national cinema in the age of globalization, the evolving parameters of art cinema, and authorship.

Representations of gender and sexuality in the cinemas of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, covering key periods and genres such as the golden age of Shanghai film, Hong Kong action pictures, opera films, post-socialist art films, and new queer cinema. Historical and contemporary perspectives on cinematic constructions of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality as they relate to issues of nationalism, modernity, globalization, and feminist and queer politics. Weekly screening required.

Practical and theoretical approaches to editing and montage. The role of editing in film meaning, and cognitive and emotional impact on the viewer. Developments in the history and theory of cinema including continuity system, Soviet montage, French new wave, postwar and American avant garde. Aesthetic functions, spectatorial effects, and ideological implications of montage. Film makers include Eisenstein, Godard, and Conner.

What makes music videos, YouTube clips and musical numbers in today's films engaging? What makes them tick? Emphasis is on aesthetics and close reading. How music videos and its related forms work. Uses of the body, how visual iconography operates, what lyrics and dialogue can do, how and what music can say, and how it can work with other media. Questions of representation such as how class, ethnicity, gender, race, and nationality function. Viewership and industry practices.

From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Czech new wave, and new Yugoslav film. Thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Wajda, Jancso, Forman, and Kusturica.

While anime has spread around the world, Japanese art animators have been busy developing a parallel tradition, built from a more personal, experimental, and idiosyncratic approach to the medium. Looking closely at key works from major artists in the field, this course explores art animation from a variety of perspectives: animation scene; philosophical attempts to account for animated movement; and art animation's unique perspective on Japanese culture.

Utopian built environments of vast perceptual and experiential richness in the cinema and city. Changing understandings of urban space in film. The cinematic city as an arena of social control, social liberation, collective memory, and complex experience. Films from international narrative traditions, industrial films, experimental cinema, documentaries, and musical sequences. Recommended: 4 or equivalent.

Why did prosperous mid-20th-century America produce a dark cinema of hard-boiled characters, gritty urban settings, stark high-contrast lighting, and convoluted plots? Key examples and the recent legacy of film noir: 40s and 50s Hollywood movies featuring anti-heroes, femmes fatales, shattered dreams, violence, and a heaviness of mood. Film noir's influences included pulp fiction; B-movie production-budgets; changes in Hollywood genres; left-populist aesthetic movements; a visual style imported by European émigré directors; innovations in camera and film technology; changes in gender roles; combat fatigue; and anxieties about the economy, communism and crime. Directors, writers, cinematographers and actors. Film viewings, readings and analyses.

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.

The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

Although art and science are often characterized as "two cultures" with limited common interests or language, they share an endeavor: gaining insight into our world. They even rely on common tools to make discoveries and visually represent their conclusions. To clarify and interrogate points of similarity and difference, each week¿s theme (time, earth, cosmos, body) explores the efforts of artists and scientists to understand and represent it and the role of technology in these efforts. Focus on contemporary examples.

Preference to sophomores. Do you want to learn more about independent film as it was practiced in major urban centers by young filmmakers? This class focuses on major movements by groups such as the Sankofa Film Collective and the L.A. Rebellion. Learn how to analyze film and to discuss the politics of production as you watch films by Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Melvin Van Peebles, Ngozi Onwurah and more. We will discuss representation, lighting, press material, and of course the films themselves. This course includes a workshop on production, trips to local film festivals and time to critique films frame-by-frame. It matters who makes film and how they do so. When you have completed this class you will be able to think critically about "alternative viewpoints" to Hollywood cinema. You will understand how independent films are made and you will be inspired to seek out and perhaps produce or promote new visions.

John Wayne's imposing corporeality and easy comportment combined to create an icon of masculinity, the American West, and America itself. Focus is on the films that contributed most to the establishment, maturation, and deconstruction of the iconography and mythology of the John Wayne character. The western and war film as genres; the crisis of and performance of masculinity in postwar culture; gender and sexuality in American national identity; relations among individualism, community, and the state; the Western and national memory; and patriotism and the Vietnam War.

From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Czech new wave, and new Yugoslav film. Thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Wajda, Jancso, Forman, and Kusturica.

A broad engagement with Indian cinema: its relationship with Indian politics, history, and economics; its key thematic concerns and forms; and its adaptation of and response to global cinematic themes, genres, and audiences. Locating the films within key critical and theoretical debates and scholarship on Indian and world cinemas. Goal is to open up what is often seen as a dauntingly complex region, especially for those who are interested in but unfamiliar with its histories and cultural forms.

In a culture obsessed with new media, we are bombarded with hype about the present as a revolutionary phase of convergence. But everything old was once new, and pioneering media of the past also had to negotiate existing technologies, ideologies, and fantasies. This seminar is organized around case studies of transitional media moments from the long 20th century, including proto-cinema, ham radio, early television, hypertext, and digital film. In exploring the material and discursive aspects of remediation through theoretical, historical, and media archaeological readings, we will ask: what is a medium and how do they emerge and evolve.

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor; capstone course for majors (senior seminar). Topics vary year to year. Focus is on historiography and theory. Limited enrollment. Permission code needed in order to enroll.

May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.

From the rise of the French New Wave to the present.

The close analysis of film. Emphasis is on formal and narrative techniques in structure and style, and detailed readings of brief sequences. Elements such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, composition, sound, and performance. Films from various historical periods, national cinemas, directors, and genres. Prerequisite: FILMSTUD 4 or equivalent. Recommended: ARTHIST 1 or FILMSTUD 102. Course can be repeated twice for a max of 8 units.

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4.

How are movies created? How are scripts developed and selected for production? How are films actually made and marketed? How are they shown in various media? Who decides what in all of these processes and what information do the decision-makers rely on?nnThis course will follow the life cycle of a movie, from its inception as an idea, article, book, etc., to its release in theaters and other media as a finished product. Guest speakers will discuss the evolution of the film industry, creative development of scripts, how deals are structured to acquire intellectual property, film finance, and how movies are physically produced and then marketed, distributed and exhibited in theaters and in other media. We will use two films as case studies ¿ The Chronicles of Narnia ¿ Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Chasing Mavericks.

Science fiction film's sense of wonder depends upon the development and revelation of new ways of seeing. The American science fiction film emphasizes the fundamental activity of human perception, its relation to bodily experience and the exploration of other worlds, new cities, and other modes of being, in such new technological spaces as the cyberspaces of the information age. It is perhaps the Hollywood genre most directly concerned with the essence of cinema itself.

The modern medium of comics, a history that spans 150 years. The flexibility of the medium encountered through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, journalism, and autobiography. Innovative creators including McCay, Kirby, Barry, Ware, and critical writings including McCloud, Eisner, Groenstee. Topics include text/image relations, panel-to-panel relations, the page, caricature, sequence, seriality, comics in the context of the fine arts, and relations to other media.

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Social, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of the cinemas of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Korea. Topics such as nation and gender, form and genre, and local and transnational conditions of practice and reception. Screenings include popular and art films from the silent to contemporary eras, including, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Im Kwon-taek.

New film cultures and movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China in the 80s. Key directors including Jia Zhangke, Wu Wenguang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui. Topics include national cinema in the age of globalization, the evolving parameters of art cinema, and authorship.

Representations of gender and sexuality in the cinemas of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, covering key periods and genres such as the golden age of Shanghai film, Hong Kong action pictures, opera films, post-socialist art films, and new queer cinema. Historical and contemporary perspectives on cinematic constructions of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality as they relate to issues of nationalism, modernity, globalization, and feminist and queer politics. Weekly screening required.

Practical and theoretical approaches to editing and montage. The role of editing in film meaning, and cognitive and emotional impact on the viewer. Developments in the history and theory of cinema including continuity system, Soviet montage, French new wave, postwar and American avant garde. Aesthetic functions, spectatorial effects, and ideological implications of montage. Film makers include Eisenstein, Godard, and Conner.

What makes music videos, YouTube clips and musical numbers in today's films engaging? What makes them tick? Emphasis is on aesthetics and close reading. How music videos and its related forms work. Uses of the body, how visual iconography operates, what lyrics and dialogue can do, how and what music can say, and how it can work with other media. Questions of representation such as how class, ethnicity, gender, race, and nationality function. Viewership and industry practices.

From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Czech new wave, and new Yugoslav film. Thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Wajda, Jancso, Forman, and Kusturica.

Utopian built environments of vast perceptual and experiential richness in the cinema and city. Changing understandings of urban space in film. The cinematic city as an arena of social control, social liberation, collective memory, and complex experience. Films from international narrative traditions, industrial films, experimental cinema, documentaries, and musical sequences. Recommended: 4 or equivalent.

Urban history and life informs the history, stories, structures and aesthetics of the comics, coinciding with the emergence of the modern metropolis in America and Europe and is rooted in the same industrial, commercial, and social transformations. Comics and cartoons were fixtures of urbane humor publications of the 19th century and became a valued fixture of the American newspaper in the very earliest part of the 20th. The characters in early comic strips were often denizens of the urban world, whether immigrants fresh off the boat or the nouveau riche. Many strips were grounded in quotidian urban experience. Later comics use the city as setting, aesthetic, and metaphor. The mean streets of Jacques Tardi's noirish cities abut the rather sunnier and shinier example of Superman's Metropolis. Science fiction comics and manga give us the impacted and often destructed cities of the future. The graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass maps the grid pattern of the comics page onto the gridded streets of Manhattan. Chris Ware's Building Stories series uses one apartment building to follow the myriad and sometimes intersecting lines found therein. Assigned readings include many comics alongside urban and comics scholarship. Artists to be considered include Outcault, Swinnerton, McCay, Eisner, Katchor, Tatsumi, Doucet, Tardi, Otomo. Hergé, Mazzuchelli, Chaykin, Miller, Ware, Pekar, Crumb, Gloeckner.

Why did prosperous mid-20th-century America produce a dark cinema of hard-boiled characters, gritty urban settings, stark high-contrast lighting, and convoluted plots? Key examples and the recent legacy of film noir: 40s and 50s Hollywood movies featuring anti-heroes, femmes fatales, shattered dreams, violence, and a heaviness of mood. Film noir's influences included pulp fiction; B-movie production-budgets; changes in Hollywood genres; left-populist aesthetic movements; a visual style imported by European émigré directors; innovations in camera and film technology; changes in gender roles; combat fatigue; and anxieties about the economy, communism and crime. Directors, writers, cinematographers and actors. Film viewings, readings and analyses.

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.

The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

Although art and science are often characterized as "two cultures" with limited common interests or language, they share an endeavor: gaining insight into our world. They even rely on common tools to make discoveries and visually represent their conclusions. To clarify and interrogate points of similarity and difference, each week¿s theme (time, earth, cosmos, body) explores the efforts of artists and scientists to understand and represent it and the role of technology in these efforts. Focus on contemporary examples.

Formal, historical, and cultural issues in the study of film. Classical narrative cinema compared with alternative narrative structures, documentary films, and experimental cinematic forms. Issues of cinematic language and visual perception, and representations of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Aesthetic and conceptual analytic skills with relevance to cinema.

History and theory of post-WW II American independent and experimental film. Emphasis is on issues of audiovisual form, structure, and medium specificity. Films and writings include Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Hollis Frampton.

Graduate seminar in film aesthetics. Theoretical and practical approaches to editing/montage. Stylistic, semiotic, epistemological, and ideological functions of montage considered in film-historical contexts including: development of the continuity system of editing; flourishing of the Soviet montage school; and achievements of the post-war new waves. Filmmakers include D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, and Dusan Makavejev.

Restricted to M.F.A. documentary film students. Topics in nonfiction media. Presentations and screenings by guest filmmakers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Restricted to M.F.A. documentary film students. Continuation of 410A. Topics in nonfiction media. Presentations and screenings by guest filmmakers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Long derided as neither literature nor art, the medium of comics, with its complex juxtapositions of word and image and of images with one another, is increasingly understood as a supple and sophisticated mode of communication and expression. Dynamic new work is appearing on a weekly basis, and lavish reprint projects have made comics history more available for study and pleasure. This seminar simultaneously explores the aesthetic and historical parameters of the medium as well as the shape of comics scholarship. As comics are something of a hybrid form, the seminar will necessarily be interdisciplinary in approach. The treatment of time, rhythm, and tempo will be considered alongside explorations of line, panel, sequence, page, story, and seriality. The flexibility of the medium will be encountered by reading broadly in comic strips (humorous and dramatic), superheroes, undergrounds and independents, political satire and pedagogy, autobiography, experimental works, and children¿s comics, as well as recent iterations of ¿the graphic novel.¿

Course surveys a range of critical perspectives and debates on Chinese cinema. It is organized on the basis of weekly topics, such as genre, historiography, gender, modernity, and the idea of national cinema. Consent of instructor required.

Physical, emotional, aesthetic, and social liberation mark this most colorful of film genres. Musicals are a place for staging issues of identity, including the impact of African American and Jewish culture, and issues of gay reception and interpretation. Attention to technologies of sound and color, the relation to vaudeville and Broadway, and ethnic and aesthetic diversity. Musicals as the epitome of filmic illusionism and the Hollywood studio system; the implications of their seduction of audiences; the meaning of spectacle, the centrality of performance. Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Bob Fosse, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli.

From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Czech new wave, and new Yugoslav film. Thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of filmmakers such as Wajda, Jancso, Forman, and Kusturica.

The seminar will discuss the workings of the face: as privileged object of representation, as figure of subjectivity, as mode and ethic of address, through film theory and practice. How has the cinema responded to the mythic and iconic charge of the face, to the portrait's exploration of model and likeness, identity and identification, the revelatory and masking play of expression, the symbolic and social registers informing the human countenance? At this intersection of archaic desires and contemporary anxieties, the face will serve as our medium by which to reconsider, in the cinematic arena, some of the oldest questions on the image. Among the filmmakers and writers who will inform our discussion are Aumont, Balázs, Barthes, Bazin, Bresson, Doane, Dreyer, Epstein, Hitchcock, Koerner, Kuleshov, Warhol, and others.

TBD

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor; capstone course for majors (senior seminar). Topics vary year to year. Focus is on historiography and theory. Limited enrollment. Permission code needed in order to enroll.

For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.

May be repeated for credit. (Staff)