71 - 80 of 84 results for: FILMSTUD

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.¿

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Permission of instructor required prior to the first day of classes.

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.

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.