111 - 120 of 133 results for: FILMSTUD

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-queer-film scholars as providing a powerful site of ideological struggle and sustained engagement with individual and social subjection and suffering. Melodrama, a transgeneric mode of emotional dramaturgy, centered around body and community, delay and chance, realism and excess, affords radical critiques of discourses of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. We will consider melodrama's careful calibration of sensation and affect through its employment of cinematic form (color, music, editing etc.), and sweeping performative gestures. Through an analysis of films from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, by auteurs such as Douglas Sirk, Ritwik Ghatak, Wong Kar-wai, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Pedro Almodovar, among others, we will study global and transnational flows in the adoption of the politics and aesthetics of the melodramatic mode. The seminar is conceived to be interdisciplinary and participants are encouraged to work with texts from disciplines other than film studies as well, including theatre, visual arts, music, dance, literature etc.

This seminar offers an overview of methods in film and media studies. It covers key debates and  interventions that have shaped the field, such as the paradigm of classical cinema, historical reception studies, genre and authorship, political modernism, psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, senses and aesthetics, and industry history. In exploring how these different approaches have expanded the discipline, students will gain a sense of the methodological stakes of their own research.

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.nnIn 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.nnThe 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.

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.

This seminar will explore the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, a widely acclaimed film auteur known for works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. The seminar will focus on close analysis of practically all of Kubrick's films, from a variety of methodological perspectives (authorship, formal/stylistic analysis, book-to-screen adaptation, and more.nnNOTE: Instructor's permission required before the first day of class.

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!

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.