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.

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.

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.

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.

In this course, we will explore what it means to write with video, and we will learn to make effective and engaging video essays about historical and contemporary audiovisual media. Specifically, we will examine formal, aesthetic, and rhetorical strategies for communicating in the medium of video, and we will conduct a series of hands-on exercises utilizing digital video editing software to construct arguments, analyses, and interpretations of film and other media (including television, video games, and online media). Compared with traditional, text-based engagements, the video essay offers a remarkably direct mode of communicating critical and analytical ideas. In this medium, authors no longer struggle to describe audiovisual contents in words that can never do justice to the rich array of details that are immediately apparent to spectators eyes and ears; instead, video essayists can simply show their viewers what they want them to see. This does not mean, however, that it is any easier to write effectively with video than it is to compose an essay with pen and paper. Similar types of expository and argumentative planning are involved in both forms, while the new technology introduces its own characteristic challenges and choices, including decisions about the spatial and temporal organization and transformation of audiovisual materials, the addition of onscreen text, voiceover commentary, and visual effects. By taking a hands-on approach, we will develop our skills with editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple's Final Cut Pro while also cultivating our awareness of the formal and narrative techniques employed in films and other moving-image media. Through weekly assignments and group critique sessions, we will learn to express ourselves more effectively and creatively in audiovisual media. As a culmination of our efforts, we will assemble a group exhibition of our best video essays for public display on campus.nNo previous experience is required, but a willingness to learn new technologies (in particular, video editing software) is important.

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.

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.

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.

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4. WIM at 4 units only.

From Anima to Anime is an introductory level course designed to familiarize students with key concepts and issues surrounding animated media in East Asian. It is by no means an exhaustive survey of the region¿s national animation traditions, be that of Japan, Korea, or Greater China. Rather, this course takes an emphatically transnational approach arguing that animation serves as an important site where national forms, traditional materials, and techniques converge with powerful currents of internationalism and modernism. We will thus look to pay close attention to the way shared cultural, aesthetic, and technological norms participate in the ongoing definition of a ¿regional¿ animated media in East Asia. In addition, we will look at how East Asian animation has given rise to significant global trends, including developments in mass media communication, franchising, adaptation, youth culture, consumption and fandom, as well as modes of play and mediated self-expression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women as objects and subjects of the voyeuristic gaze inherent to cinema. The myth of the feminine idol in French films in historical and cultural context since the New Wave until now. The mythology of stars as the imaginary vehicle that helped France to change from traditional society to modern, culturally mixed nation. The evolution of female characters, roles, actresses, directors in the film industry. Filmmakers include Vadim, Truffaut, Varda, Godard, Ozon, Colline Serreau, Tonie Marshall, Maïwen. Discussion in English; films in French with English subtitles. 3 units, 4 units or 5 units.nNOTE: FILMSTUD students must take this course for 3 units only.

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.

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

The human simulacrum has a long history in mythology, fairy tales and children¿s stories, as well as in the genres of horror and science fiction. This course explores synthetic human narratives in the cinema. Stories of artificially created life, living statues, automata, body snatchers, robots, cyborgs and electronic simulations all direct our attention to our assumed definitions of the human.The fantasies and anxieties that undergird these stories engage with such issues as labor, gender, sexuality, death, emotion, rationality, embodiment, consumerism, reproductive technologies, and power relations. Attention will also be given the relation of cinema¿s human simulacra to changing cinematic technologies. Films will include Metropolis, Pinocchio, Robocop, Bride of Frankenstein, The Golem, A.I., My Fair Lady, Her, Blade Runner, and the HBO iteration of Westworld. Readings will include essays, as well as some fiction and possibly comics.

TBA

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world, with a focus on American visual culture from the 19th century through the present. We study the history of different tools from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities; the way technological shifts, such as the introduction of electric lights or train travel, have shaped our visual imagination and aesthetic sensibilities; and how technology has inspired or responded to visual art. Special attention is paid to how different media, such as photography, cinema, and computer screens, translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with notions of time and space.

This is an introductory-level course about the cinema as a global language. We will undertake a comparative study of select historical and contemporary aspects of international cinema, and explore a range of themes pertaining to the social, cultural, and political diversity of the world. A cross-regional thematic emphasis and inter-textual methods of narrative and aesthetic analysis, will ground our discussion of films from Italy, Japan, United States, India, China, France, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Mexico, and a number of other countries. Particular emphasis will be placed on the multi-cultural character and the regional specificities of the cinema as a "universal language" and an inclusive "relational network."nnThere are no prerequisites for this class. It is open to all students; non-majors welcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course examines the practices of appropriation of archival material in cinema, and the problems of representation inherent to them. The practical component consists of a series of creative assignments in which students are asked to use archival material, including some from Stanford's collections, to produce short moving image pieces.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ever since Frankenstein unleashed his monster onto the world in Mary Shelley¿s novel from 1818, the notion of ¿technology-out-of-control¿ has been a constant worry of modern societies, plaguing more optimistic visions of progress and innovation with fears that modern machines harbor potentials that, once set in motion, can no longer be tamed by their human makers. In this characteristically modern myth, the act of making ¿ and especially technological making ¿ gives rise to monsters. As a cautionary tale, we are therefore entreated to look before we leap, to go slow and think critically about the possible consequences of invention before we attempt to make something radically new. However, this means of approaching the issue of human-technological relations implies a fundamental opposition between thinking and making, suggesting a split between cognition as the specifically human capacity for reflection versus a causal determinism-without-reflection that characterizes the machinic or the technical. Nevertheless, recent media theory questions this dichotomy by asserting that technologies are inseparable from humans¿ abilities to think and to act in the world, while artistic practices undo the thinking/making split more directly and materially, by taking materials ¿ including technologies ¿ as the very medium of their critical engagement with the world. Drawing on impulses from both media theory and art practice, ¿critical making¿ names a counterpart to ¿critical thinking¿ ¿ one that utilizes technologies to think about humans¿ constitutive entanglements with technology, while recognizing that insight often comes from errors, glitches, malfunctions, or even monsters. Co-taught by a practicing artist and a media theorist, this course will engage students in hands-on critical practices involving both theories and technologies. Let¿s make a monster!

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.

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.

This seminar explores a set of currents in media theory (and related fields), which we will seek to navigate together as a group. We will focus on approaches, discourses, conversations, and paradigms that seek to explain the mediations, modulations, and triangulations of our experience within a changing landscape of technological, social, political, and other forces. Special attention will be given to contemporary works of theory and/or works that are enjoying a renewed contemporary reception.

This seminar will explore the vast array of horror comics. How does horror work in comics, as distinct from prose and cinema? How and why are non-moving images scary? The different narrational strategies of short stories, self-contained works, and continuing series will be explored, as will American, Japanese, and European approaches. Special attention will be given to Frankenstein, in novel, film, illustration, and comics. Example of such sub-genres as literary horror, horrific superheroes, cosmic (Lovecraftian) horror, ecological horror, as well as the horrors of bodies, sexuality, and adolescence will be encountered.nnStudents will read many comics, some comics theory, and will do an in-class presentation on a comic or topic of their choosing. The course is a seminar, so discussion will be continuous and required. Enrollment limited.

This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to other (digital as well as non-digital) non-game media, such as film, television, print fiction, or non-game computer applications? Of course, to engage meaningfully with these questions at all will require us to investigate theories of mediality (including inter- and transmediality) more generally. Finally, though, we will be interested in the formal and experiential parameters that define (different types of) digital games in particular. What does it feel like to play (various) digital games? What are the relations between storytelling and the activity of gameplaying in them? What is the relation between these aspects and the underlying mechanics of digital games, as embodied in hardware and software? What is the role of the human body? Because these questions can only be approached on the basis of personal experience, students will be expected to spend some time playing digital games and reflecting critically on their gameplay.

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.

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.

The acting career of Burt Lancaster extended from 1946 to 1991. He began as a contract player within the Hollywood studio system, but, like many stars of the time, he founded his own production company in the 1950s. A tremendously physical actor, he entered film history as a brooding (if hunky) presence in film noir before becoming an exuberant swashbuckler in westerns and adventure films and, still later, a thoughtful, magisterial figure in works by a number of European auteurs.nnnThis course will have a dual grounding. Lancaster will be considered as a case study in film acting/performance. Acting is a fundament of narrative cinema and an undeniable source of cinematic pleasure, yet it represents a blind spot in film studies. The class will propose that the work Lancaster produced demonstrates coherence, consistency, and performative richness worthy of close examination. The class will also posit Burt Lancaster as an iconic screen figure whose long and manifold career may also be approached through a variety of other methodological frameworks, including genre (film noir, western, war film, spy thriller, etc.), national cinemas (American, Italian, French, co-productions), and authorship.nnnEach class will be divided between critical engagement with assigned readings, close analysis of Lancaster's performances, and careful attention to the stylistic and formal properties of the chosen films. The screening list will be supplemented with ample clips from additional films.

May be repeated for credit.

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.

From cinema's precursors to the advent of synchronized sound.

The impact of sound to the dissolution of Hollywood's studio system.

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.

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.

Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4. WIM at 4 units only.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content.

Historical, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary through nonfiction films in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

The human simulacrum has a long history in mythology, fairy tales and children¿s stories, as well as in the genres of horror and science fiction. This course explores synthetic human narratives in the cinema. Stories of artificially created life, living statues, automata, body snatchers, robots, cyborgs and electronic simulations all direct our attention to our assumed definitions of the human.The fantasies and anxieties that undergird these stories engage with such issues as labor, gender, sexuality, death, emotion, rationality, embodiment, consumerism, reproductive technologies, and power relations. Attention will also be given the relation of cinema¿s human simulacra to changing cinematic technologies. Films will include Metropolis, Pinocchio, Robocop, Bride of Frankenstein, The Golem, A.I., My Fair Lady, Her, Blade Runner, and the HBO iteration of Westworld. Readings will include essays, as well as some fiction and possibly comics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is an introductory-level course about the cinema as a global language. We will undertake a comparative study of select historical and contemporary aspects of international cinema, and explore a range of themes pertaining to the social, cultural, and political diversity of the world. A cross-regional thematic emphasis and inter-textual methods of narrative and aesthetic analysis, will ground our discussion of films from Italy, Japan, United States, India, China, France, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Mexico, and a number of other countries. Particular emphasis will be placed on the multi-cultural character and the regional specificities of the cinema as a "universal language" and an inclusive "relational network."nnThere are no prerequisites for this class. It is open to all students; non-majors welcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course examines the practices of appropriation of archival material in cinema, and the problems of representation inherent to them. The practical component consists of a series of creative assignments in which students are asked to use archival material, including some from Stanford's collections, to produce short moving image pieces.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ever since Frankenstein unleashed his monster onto the world in Mary Shelley¿s novel from 1818, the notion of ¿technology-out-of-control¿ has been a constant worry of modern societies, plaguing more optimistic visions of progress and innovation with fears that modern machines harbor potentials that, once set in motion, can no longer be tamed by their human makers. In this characteristically modern myth, the act of making ¿ and especially technological making ¿ gives rise to monsters. As a cautionary tale, we are therefore entreated to look before we leap, to go slow and think critically about the possible consequences of invention before we attempt to make something radically new. However, this means of approaching the issue of human-technological relations implies a fundamental opposition between thinking and making, suggesting a split between cognition as the specifically human capacity for reflection versus a causal determinism-without-reflection that characterizes the machinic or the technical. Nevertheless, recent media theory questions this dichotomy by asserting that technologies are inseparable from humans¿ abilities to think and to act in the world, while artistic practices undo the thinking/making split more directly and materially, by taking materials ¿ including technologies ¿ as the very medium of their critical engagement with the world. Drawing on impulses from both media theory and art practice, ¿critical making¿ names a counterpart to ¿critical thinking¿ ¿ one that utilizes technologies to think about humans¿ constitutive entanglements with technology, while recognizing that insight often comes from errors, glitches, malfunctions, or even monsters. Co-taught by a practicing artist and a media theorist, this course will engage students in hands-on critical practices involving both theories and technologies. Let¿s make a monster!

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.

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.

In this seminar, we will consider the body on screen as well as the body before the screen i.e. the spectator but also the profilmic body of the actor to examine corporeal performance and reception with respect to audiovisual media. The dancing body, the comic body, dead and live bodies, the monstrous body, the body in pain, the virtual body all raise questions about embodiment, liveness, and performance. Through a discussion of make-up, fashion, the labor of producing the idealized star body from the meat-and-bones of a body of the actor, or body genres where the spectator's body is beside itself with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness, we may inquire into ideologies of discipline and desire that undergird mediatized bodies.

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.

This seminar explores a set of currents in media theory (and related fields), which we will seek to navigate together as a group. We will focus on approaches, discourses, conversations, and paradigms that seek to explain the mediations, modulations, and triangulations of our experience within a changing landscape of technological, social, political, and other forces. Special attention will be given to contemporary works of theory and/or works that are enjoying a renewed contemporary reception.

This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to other (digital as well as non-digital) non-game media, such as film, television, print fiction, or non-game computer applications? Of course, to engage meaningfully with these questions at all will require us to investigate theories of mediality (including inter- and transmediality) more generally. Finally, though, we will be interested in the formal and experiential parameters that define (different types of) digital games in particular. What does it feel like to play (various) digital games? What are the relations between storytelling and the activity of gameplaying in them? What is the relation between these aspects and the underlying mechanics of digital games, as embodied in hardware and software? What is the role of the human body? Because these questions can only be approached on the basis of personal experience, students will be expected to spend some time playing digital games and reflecting critically on their gameplay.

Permission of instructor required for enrollment.

The acting career of Burt Lancaster extended from 1946 to 1991. He began as a contract player within the Hollywood studio system, but, like many stars of the time, he founded his own production company in the 1950s. A tremendously physical actor, he entered film history as a brooding (if hunky) presence in film noir before becoming an exuberant swashbuckler in westerns and adventure films and, still later, a thoughtful, magisterial figure in works by a number of European auteurs.nnnThis course will have a dual grounding. Lancaster will be considered as a case study in film acting/performance. Acting is a fundament of narrative cinema and an undeniable source of cinematic pleasure, yet it represents a blind spot in film studies. The class will propose that the work Lancaster produced demonstrates coherence, consistency, and performative richness worthy of close examination. The class will also posit Burt Lancaster as an iconic screen figure whose long and manifold career may also be approached through a variety of other methodological frameworks, including genre (film noir, western, war film, spy thriller, etc.), national cinemas (American, Italian, French, co-productions), and authorship.nnnEach class will be divided between critical engagement with assigned readings, close analysis of Lancaster's performances, and careful attention to the stylistic and formal properties of the chosen films. The screening list will be supplemented with ample clips from additional films.

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

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

May be repeated for credit. (Staff)