91 - 99 of 99 results for: FILMSTUD

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.

Permission of instructor required for enrollment.

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.

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

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