1 - 10 of 16 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

May be repeated for credit.

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.