81 - 90 of 99 results for: FILMSTUD

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

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.

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.¿

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.