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FILMSTUD 4: Introduction to Film Study

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.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Levi, P. (PI)

FILMSTUD 4S: Language of Film

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.
Terms: Sum | Units: 3
Instructors: ; Levi, P. (PI)

FILMSTUD 6: Introduction to Media

What is a medium? This course starts from the assumption that the answer to this question is not as obvious as it might at first appear. Clearly, we know some media when we see them: radio, film, and television are in many ways paradigmatic media of the twentieth century. But what about the computational, networked media of the twenty-first century? Are these still media in the same sense, or has the nature of media changed with the emergence of digital technologies? And what, for that matter, about pre-technical media? Is painting a medium in the same sense that oil or acrylic are media, or in the sense that we speak of ¿mixed media¿? Is language a medium? Are numbers? Is the body? As we shall see, the question of what a medium is raises a number of other questions of a theoretical or even philosophical nature. How is our experience of the world affected or shaped by media? Are knowledge and perception possible apart from media, or are they always mediated by the apparatuses, instruments, or assemblages of media? What is the relation between the forms and the contents of media, and how does this relation bear on questions of aesthetics, science, technology, or politics? The lecture-based course addresses these and other questions and seeks in this way to introduce a way of thinking about media that goes beyond taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions, and that has a potentially transformative effect on a wide range of theoretical and practical interests.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Denson, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 6B: Media and Visual Culture

TBA
| Units: 5

FILMSTUD 7: Introduction to Television Studies

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2010 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 100A: History of World Cinema I, 1895-1929 (FILMSTUD 300A)

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 100B: History of World Cinema II, 1930-1959 (FILMSTUD 300B)

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 100C: History of World Cinema III, 1960-Present (FILMSTUD 300C)

This course will provide an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We will study some key film movements and national cinemas towards developing a historical appreciation of a variety of commercial and art film traditions. Through an exploration of films from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we shall examine the industrial histories of non-Hollywood film production and exhibition practices that produce the particular cinematic cultures of each region.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 101: Fundamentals of Cinematic Analysis (FILMSTUD 301)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II | Repeatable 3 times (up to 12 units total)
Instructors: ; Ma, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 102: Theories of the Moving Image (FILMSTUD 302)

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 104: Introduction to the Movies- How Movies Are Developed, Produced, Marketed and Exhibited (FILMSTUD 304)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 105: The Films of Ernst Lubitsch (FILMSTUD 305)

Ernst Lubitsch was: a stage actor in Berlin; a comic actor in early German cinema; Germany's most profitable director in the early 1920s; a director of subtle silent comedies in Hollywood in the later `20s; an innovative director of sound musicals and comedies in the 1930s; head of production for Paramount Pictures; and one of the few directors whose name and likeness were familiar to audiences across America, one famed for what became known as The Lubitsch Touch. The course considers Lubitsch in all these contexts. Charts intersections with collaborators, genre conventions, sexuality and censorship, and studio control. Lubitsch's style depends on performance, so attention will be given to film acting as he came to shape it.
Terms: Win | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 110: Science Fiction Cinema (FILMSTUD 310)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 110N: Darkness in Light: The Filmic Imagination of Horror

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.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 114: Reading Comics (AMSTUD 114X, FILMSTUD 314)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 114S: Introduction to Comic Studies

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.
Last offered: Summer 2016 | Units: 3

FILMSTUD 115: Documentary Issues and Traditions (FILMSTUD 315)

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 116: International Documentary (FILMSTUD 316)

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
Instructors: ; Keca, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 119: Science Fiction

The course will focus on science fiction films that take as a central theme human and nonhuman intelligence and its mediation. Possible films include Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX 1138, Tron, Videodrome, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (multiple versions), and Wall-E. How does cinema, through sound and set design, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and animation, engage science fiction¿s exploration of technological and social change, the boundaries of human and non-human, and the nature of cognition, imagination and identity? Are these concerns at the heart of filmmaking or is science fiction a genre at odds with cinema, the most technological of the arts?
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 125: Horror Films

TBA
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 127: Frankenstein and Film

When Mary Shelley bid [her] hideous progeny go forth and prosper in the 1831 introduction to the revised edition of her novel, she could scarcely have imagined how successful her tale would be in reproducing itself. It is estimated that over 200 film adaptations of Frankenstein have been produced, spanning from Thomas Edison's 1910 single-reel silent film to digitally-enhanced CGI spectacles like Van Helsing (2004) and I, Frankenstein (2014). The films seldom fail to say something about the social settings in which they were produced, and quite often they comment reflexively on the medium of film itself. The monsters depicted can thus be interrogated in terms of the social-semiotic processes by which certain subjectivities and bodies are constituted as the normative ideals of humanity while others are excluded as aberrations. On the other hand, the films offer a register of the historically contingent relations between humans and their technologies not least among them, the relation of the spectator to the cinematic medium and apparatus. nIn this lecture-based course, we shall therefore investigate monstrosity on a number of levels: from the social level at which people are defined on the basis of gender, race, class, or disability in relation to privileged forms of embodiment and subjectivity, all the way up to the technological level at which human beings are arguably being reconfigured at present into cyborgs or human-technological hybrids. We will approach these and other questions by way of a selection of Frankenstein films, which we will view, read about, and discuss in detail. It will be important, though, that we not lose sight of the filmic nature of our texts; one objective of the course should therefore be a better understanding of the formal properties of the medium of film how things are depicted, not just what is thematized.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Denson, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 129: Animation and the Animated Film (AMSTUD 129, FILMSTUD 329)

The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course considers the underlying fantasies of animation in art and lit, its phenomenologies, its relation to the uncanny, its status as a pure cinema, and its place in film theory. Different modes of production and style to be explored include realist animation, abstract animation; animistic animation; animated drawings, objects, and puppets; CGI, motion capture, and live/animation hybrids.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 131: Cinemato-graph (FILMSTUD 331, SLAVIC 185, SLAVIC 285)

The term cinematography, which literally means "inscribing motion," tends to lose the "graphic" part in modern use. However, several influential film-makers not only practiced the art of "inscribing motion" but also wrote texts discussing the aesthetic premises of cinematographic art. This course explores theories of cinema as propagated by the following film-makers: Vertov, Eisenstein, Godard, Bresson, Antonioni, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Greenaway, and Lynch. Selected key texts will be supplemented by screenings of classic films, indicative of each director's work.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 132A: Indian Cinema

This course will provide an overview of cinema from India, the world's largest producer of films. We will trace the history of Indian cinema from the silent era, through the studio period, to state-funded art filmmaking to the contemporary production of Bollywood films as well as the more unconventional multiplex cinema. We will examine narrative conventions, stylistic techniques, and film production and consumption practices in popular Hindi language films from the Bombay film industry as well as commercial and art films in other languages. This outline of different cinematic modes will throw light on the social, political, and economic transformations in the nation-state over the last century.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 133: Contemporary Chinese Auteurs (FILMSTUD 333)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 136: Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Cinema (FILMSTUD 336)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2012 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-Gender

FILMSTUD 140: Film Aesthetics: Editing (FILMSTUD 340)

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.
| Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

FILMSTUD 141: Music Across Media: Music Video to Postclassical Cinema (FILMSTUD 341, MUSIC 185, MUSIC 385)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

FILMSTUD 145: Politics and Aesthetics in East European Cinema (FILMSTUD 345)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 146: Art Animation (JAPAN 152, JAPAN 252)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 2-4

FILMSTUD 147: Iberian and Latin American Experimental Cinemas, 1960s to the Present (FILMSTUD 347)

This class will offer a panorama of Iberian and Latin American experimental film cultures from the 1960 to the present. We will focus on developments and formations mainly in Mexico, Brasil, Argentina, and Spain, but will cast side glances at Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, Paraguay and Uruguay. Among our main thematic interests will be the representation of the body and sexuality; abstraction; politics; the reading of history; personal subgenres (the essay and the diary film); and collage and appropriation. Readings will range from general theoretical statements on experimental film aesthetics to specific historical and critical excavations of experimental film by contemporary critics and historians.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Suarez Sanchez, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 150: Cinema and the City (FILMSTUD 350)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2009 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom

FILMSTUD 157: Film Noir from Bogart to Mulholland Drive (FILMSTUD 357)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 164A: Technology and the Visual Imagination (ARTHIST 164A, ARTHIST 364A, FILMSTUD 364A)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 165A: Fashion Shows: From Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga (ARTHIST 165A, ARTHIST 365A, FILMSTUD 365A)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 165B: American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion (AMSTUD 127, ARTHIST 165B)

Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its historical context and American culture; the interplay between fashion and other modes of discourse, in particular art, but also performance, music, economics; and the use of fashion as an expression of social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 167B: Beyond the Fuzzy-Techie Divide: Art, Science, Technology (ARTHIST 167, ARTHIST 367, FILMSTUD 367B)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2014 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 181Q: Alternative Viewpoints: Black Independent Film (AFRICAAM 181Q)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

FILMSTUD 213: Global Melodrama (FILMSTUD 413)

Commonly derided for being over the top, with films in this mode put down as weepies, tear-jerkers, and women's films, melodrama as a genre and a cinematic mode has been reclaimed by feminist and film scholars as providing a powerful site of ideological struggle. In this course, we will develop a historical and theoretical framework to examine how this popular dramatic mode, centered around the family, the home, and personal relationships affords radical critiques of and insights into discourses of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation.n nWe will consider melodrama's careful calibration of sensation and affect through its employment of emotions, pathos, and sweeping performative gestures that afford a sustained engagement with individual and social subjection and suffering. Through an analysis of films from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and by auteurs such as Sirk, Ghatak, Fassbinder, and Almodovar, among others, the course encourages an exploration of global and transnational flows in the adoption of the politics and aesthetics of the melodramatic mode.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 216: The Films of Robert Altman (FILMSTUD 416)

A collaborative consideration of Robert Altman¿s prolific and varied work as a director. The course will examine well-known films such as the narratively and stylistically innovative Nashville, creative genre revisions such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Gosford Park; and the culturally iconic M.A.S.H. We will also pay close attention to less famous work such as Secret Honor, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull¿s History Lesson with the aim of describing and assessing a complex oeuvre. There will be a course bibliography, but required reading will be relatively light to make time for both careful and extensive viewing.
Terms: Win | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 220: Being John Wayne (AMSTUD 220B, TAPS 220A)

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.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 232: Chinese Cinema (FILMSTUD 432)

This 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.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 245B: History and Politics in Russian and Eastern European Cinema (FILMSTUD 445B, REES 301B)

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. Permission of instructor required prior to the first day of classes.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Levi, P. (PI)

FILMSTUD 249: Eye of the Beholder: Subjective Cinema (FILMSTUD 449)

This course proposes to look at how even the most seemingly objective films are shaped by a subjective eye. An eye which is molded by gender, race, culture and class - all of which influence the entire film-making process and experience from how something is framed to how it is cut and and how it is perceived it. How we look at something, for how long we look at it and in what context we are shown something is as important as what we are looking at. Similarly the subjective eye of the viewer shapes how he or she understands and interprets the film. Whether the viewer is an insider or outsider to the subject completely changes expectations and reactions to the film. So then what are we really talking about when we talk about documentary films? What makes a documentary a documentary? Why is such a categorization valuable? necessary? useful? nThe course will combine analysis of films, theoretical texts, and some practical ¿production" exercises.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 250B: Bollywood and Beyond: An Introduction to Indian Film (COMPLIT 247, GLOBAL 250)

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.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Mediratta, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 251: Media in Transition

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2010 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 264B: Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (AMSTUD 143X, ARTHIST 264B)

Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

FILMSTUD 273: Visual Culture of the Arctic (ARTHIST 273)

In what ways does contemporary art address the slowly unfolding catastrophes of melting ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic due to climate change? How might contemporary art and experimental cinema help us come to grips with the emotional disturbance of living amidst the deep-seated changes that are happening in our environment? These are the key questions this course attempts to answer.nThe first part of the class attempts to outline the complex history of Arctic visual and cultural representations through an interdisciplinary lens. The second part focuses on the more recent artistic and cinematic responses to climate change in the arctic. For their final projects, students will be able to combine analytical writing with creative projects that could take the form of photography, installation art, web-based art, fiction, video or poetry.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 290: Movies and Methods: Post-Cinema (FILMSTUD 490)

In this seminar, we will try to come to terms with twenty-first century motion pictures by thinking through a variety of concepts and theoretical approaches designed to explain their relations and differences from the cinema of the previous century. We will consider the impact of digital technologies on film, think about the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices of contemporary motion pictures, and try to understand the experiential dimensions of spectatorship in today's altered viewing conditions. nIn addition to viewing a wide range of recent and contemporary films, we will also engage more directly and materially with post-cinematic moving images: we will experiment with scholarly and experimental uses of non-linear video editing for the purposes of film analysis, cinemetrics, and a variety of academic and creative responses to post-cinematic media.nThe course addresses key issues in recent film and media theory and, especially in its hands-on components, encourages experimentation with methods of digital humanities, computational media art, and other creative practices.nNote: 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.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Denson, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 297: Honors Thesis Writing

May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr | Units: 1-5 | Repeatable 1 times (up to 5 units total)

FILMSTUD 299: Independent Study: Film and Media Studies

Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms and payment are required by the end of Week 2 of each quarter. Please contact the Undergraduate Coordinator in McMurtry 108 for more information. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum | Units: 1-15 | Repeatable for credit

FILMSTUD 300A: History of World Cinema I, 1895-1929 (FILMSTUD 100A)

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 300B: History of World Cinema II, 1930-1959 (FILMSTUD 100B)

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 300C: History of World Cinema III, 1960-Present (FILMSTUD 100C)

This course will provide an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We will study some key film movements and national cinemas towards developing a historical appreciation of a variety of commercial and art film traditions. Through an exploration of films from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we shall examine the industrial histories of non-Hollywood film production and exhibition practices that produce the particular cinematic cultures of each region.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 301: Fundamentals of Cinematic Analysis (FILMSTUD 101)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | Repeatable 3 times (up to 12 units total)
Instructors: ; Ma, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 302: Theories of the Moving Image (FILMSTUD 102)

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 304: Introduction to the Movies- How Movies Are Developed, Produced, Marketed and Exhibited (FILMSTUD 104)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 305: The Films of Ernst Lubitsch (FILMSTUD 105)

Ernst Lubitsch was: a stage actor in Berlin; a comic actor in early German cinema; Germany's most profitable director in the early 1920s; a director of subtle silent comedies in Hollywood in the later `20s; an innovative director of sound musicals and comedies in the 1930s; head of production for Paramount Pictures; and one of the few directors whose name and likeness were familiar to audiences across America, one famed for what became known as The Lubitsch Touch. The course considers Lubitsch in all these contexts. Charts intersections with collaborators, genre conventions, sexuality and censorship, and studio control. Lubitsch's style depends on performance, so attention will be given to film acting as he came to shape it.
Terms: Win | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 310: Science Fiction Cinema (FILMSTUD 110)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 314: Reading Comics (AMSTUD 114X, FILMSTUD 114)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 315: Documentary Issues and Traditions (FILMSTUD 115)

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 316: International Documentary (FILMSTUD 116)

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Keca, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 329: Animation and the Animated Film (AMSTUD 129, FILMSTUD 129)

The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course considers the underlying fantasies of animation in art and lit, its phenomenologies, its relation to the uncanny, its status as a pure cinema, and its place in film theory. Different modes of production and style to be explored include realist animation, abstract animation; animistic animation; animated drawings, objects, and puppets; CGI, motion capture, and live/animation hybrids.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 331: Cinemato-graph (FILMSTUD 131, SLAVIC 185, SLAVIC 285)

The term cinematography, which literally means "inscribing motion," tends to lose the "graphic" part in modern use. However, several influential film-makers not only practiced the art of "inscribing motion" but also wrote texts discussing the aesthetic premises of cinematographic art. This course explores theories of cinema as propagated by the following film-makers: Vertov, Eisenstein, Godard, Bresson, Antonioni, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Greenaway, and Lynch. Selected key texts will be supplemented by screenings of classic films, indicative of each director's work.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 3-5

FILMSTUD 332: East Asian Cinema

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.
Last offered: Spring 2007 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 333: Contemporary Chinese Auteurs (FILMSTUD 133)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 336: Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Cinema (FILMSTUD 136)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2012 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 340: Film Aesthetics: Editing (FILMSTUD 140)

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.
| Units: 4

FILMSTUD 341: Music Across Media: Music Video to Postclassical Cinema (FILMSTUD 141, MUSIC 185, MUSIC 385)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 345: Politics and Aesthetics in East European Cinema (FILMSTUD 145)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 347: Iberian and Latin American Experimental Cinemas, 1960s to the Present (FILMSTUD 147)

This class will offer a panorama of Iberian and Latin American experimental film cultures from the 1960 to the present. We will focus on developments and formations mainly in Mexico, Brasil, Argentina, and Spain, but will cast side glances at Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, Paraguay and Uruguay. Among our main thematic interests will be the representation of the body and sexuality; abstraction; politics; the reading of history; personal subgenres (the essay and the diary film); and collage and appropriation. Readings will range from general theoretical statements on experimental film aesthetics to specific historical and critical excavations of experimental film by contemporary critics and historians.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Suarez Sanchez, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 350: Cinema and the City (FILMSTUD 150)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2009 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 355: Comics and the City

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.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 357: Film Noir from Bogart to Mulholland Drive (FILMSTUD 157)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 364A: Technology and the Visual Imagination (ARTHIST 164A, ARTHIST 364A, FILMSTUD 164A)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 365A: Fashion Shows: From Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga (ARTHIST 165A, ARTHIST 365A, FILMSTUD 165A)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 367B: Beyond the Fuzzy-Techie Divide: Art, Science, Technology (ARTHIST 167, ARTHIST 367, FILMSTUD 167B)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2014 | Units: 4

FILMSTUD 402: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Media & Study

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.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Ma, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 404: Postwar American Avant Garde 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.
Last offered: Spring 2014 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 406: Montage

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 410: Documentary Perspectives I

Restricted to M.F.A. documentary film students. Topics in nonfiction media. Presentations and screenings by guest filmmakers. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | Repeatable for credit
Instructors: ; Meltzer, J. (PI)

FILMSTUD 413: Global Melodrama (FILMSTUD 213)

Commonly derided for being over the top, with films in this mode put down as weepies, tear-jerkers, and women's films, melodrama as a genre and a cinematic mode has been reclaimed by feminist and film scholars as providing a powerful site of ideological struggle. In this course, we will develop a historical and theoretical framework to examine how this popular dramatic mode, centered around the family, the home, and personal relationships affords radical critiques of and insights into discourses of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation.n nWe will consider melodrama's careful calibration of sensation and affect through its employment of emotions, pathos, and sweeping performative gestures that afford a sustained engagement with individual and social subjection and suffering. Through an analysis of films from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and by auteurs such as Sirk, Ghatak, Fassbinder, and Almodovar, among others, the course encourages an exploration of global and transnational flows in the adoption of the politics and aesthetics of the melodramatic mode.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 414: Comics

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.¿
Last offered: Winter 2013 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 416: The Films of Robert Altman (FILMSTUD 216)

A collaborative consideration of Robert Altman¿s prolific and varied work as a director. The course will examine well-known films such as the narratively and stylistically innovative Nashville, creative genre revisions such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Gosford Park; and the culturally iconic M.A.S.H. We will also pay close attention to less famous work such as Secret Honor, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull¿s History Lesson with the aim of describing and assessing a complex oeuvre. There will be a course bibliography, but required reading will be relatively light to make time for both careful and extensive viewing.
Terms: Win | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Oeler, K. (PI)

FILMSTUD 423: Seriality

In this seminar, we will think about serial forms and serialization processes across a range of media and investigate their relations to our aesthetic experiences, media-technological apparatuses, and sociocultural formations. We will focus especially on the popular, commercial forms of seriality that have emerged since the nineteenth century and dominated large sections of popular culture in the forms of serialized novels, film and radio serials, and television series. But this investigation will be relevant as well for the study of high art, or art forms situated outside the realm of the popular. This is true not only for movements, like Pop Art, that engage explicitly with popular culture, but also for a wide range of artistic practices that are affected or informed by industrial processes and utilize for their expressive or aesthetic purposes the formal techniques of seriality. Ultimately, we may inquire whether there is a deeper relation between seriality and mediality more generally whether media rely for their conceptual definition or practical efficacy upon a serial interplay between repetition and variation. On the other hand, however, we will attend also to the possible differences between industrial, pre-industrial, and digital forms of serialization and think about the role of seriality in media-historical shifts and transformations.nThe course seeks to illuminate forms and phenomena that are central to our cultural and aesthetic experience of the world. In addition to engaging with a wide range of readings and viewings assigned by the instructor, participants are invited to contribute actively to the courses comparative focus with materials, projects, and presentations of their own.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Denson, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 430: Cinema and Ideology

The relationship between cinema and ideology from theoretical and historical perspectives, emphasizing Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches. The practice of political filmmaking, and the cinema as an audiovisual apparatus and socio-cultural institution. Topics include: dialectics; revolutionary aesthetics; language and power; commodity fetishism; and nationalism. Filmmakers include Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruce Conner, and Marco Ferreri. Theoretical writers include Karl Marx, Sergei Eisenstein, and Slavoj Zizek. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 432: Chinese Cinema (FILMSTUD 232)

This 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.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 434: Gender and Performance (FEMGEN 434, MUSIC 434, TAPS 344A)

This seminar seeks to investigate relationships between performance, gender, and the body politic through a discussion of embodiment, body cultures, queerness, desire, representation. Through a weekly engagement with film texts from across the world as well as theoretical perspectives on gender and performance in various geo-political contexts, we will explore the intersections of gender with race, class, national discourse, and performance traditions. The seminar is conceived to be interdisciplinary and participants are encouraged to introduce and work with texts from other disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, dance, literature etc. No prior engagement with film studies is required. Screening times may range from 90 to 180 minutes.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Iyer, U. (PI)

FILMSTUD 436: Chinese Cinema

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 440: Sound Technology

Development of sound technology and reproduction in context of modernity, with some emphasis on the crossings of sound and image in the history and theory of technological reproduction. Topics include phonography, recording, and mass culture (Adorno, Sterne, Thompson, Lastra); cinematic sound and music (Chion, Altman, Gorbman); filmic and compositional practices in the American avant-garde (Joseph, Kahn); acoustic ecology (Schafer). Weekly screenings or listenings.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 442: Hollywood Musical

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.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 445B: History and Politics in Russian and Eastern European Cinema (FILMSTUD 245B, REES 301B)

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. Permission of instructor required prior to the first day of classes.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Levi, P. (PI)

FILMSTUD 449: Eye of the Beholder: Subjective Cinema (FILMSTUD 249)

This course proposes to look at how even the most seemingly objective films are shaped by a subjective eye. An eye which is molded by gender, race, culture and class - all of which influence the entire film-making process and experience from how something is framed to how it is cut and and how it is perceived it. How we look at something, for how long we look at it and in what context we are shown something is as important as what we are looking at. Similarly the subjective eye of the viewer shapes how he or she understands and interprets the film. Whether the viewer is an insider or outsider to the subject completely changes expectations and reactions to the film. So then what are we really talking about when we talk about documentary films? What makes a documentary a documentary? Why is such a categorization valuable? necessary? useful? nThe course will combine analysis of films, theoretical texts, and some practical ¿production" exercises.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 458: The Face on Film

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | Units: 5

FILMSTUD 465: Post War American Avant-Garde Film

Permission of instructor required for enrollment.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Levi, P. (PI)

FILMSTUD 490: Movies and Methods: Post-Cinema (FILMSTUD 290)

In this seminar, we will try to come to terms with twenty-first century motion pictures by thinking through a variety of concepts and theoretical approaches designed to explain their relations and differences from the cinema of the previous century. We will consider the impact of digital technologies on film, think about the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices of contemporary motion pictures, and try to understand the experiential dimensions of spectatorship in today's altered viewing conditions. nIn addition to viewing a wide range of recent and contemporary films, we will also engage more directly and materially with post-cinematic moving images: we will experiment with scholarly and experimental uses of non-linear video editing for the purposes of film analysis, cinemetrics, and a variety of academic and creative responses to post-cinematic media.nThe course addresses key issues in recent film and media theory and, especially in its hands-on components, encourages experimentation with methods of digital humanities, computational media art, and other creative practices.nNote: 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.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Denson, S. (PI)

FILMSTUD 620: Area Core Examination Preparation

For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum | Units: 5 | Repeatable 3 times (up to 24 units total)

FILMSTUD 660: Independent Study

For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum | Units: 1-15 | Repeatable for credit

FILMSTUD 660E: Extended Seminar

May be repeated for credit. (Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr | Units: 4 | Repeatable for credit
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