51 - 60 of 133 results for: FILMSTUD

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 explores the rise of nonlinear approaches to storytelling in global narrative cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. We will begin with Rashomon and end somewhere around Inception, also considering examples from Hong Kong, Senegal, France, and Mexico. Readings will touch on film analysis, history and politics, and narrative theory.

¿How to watch TV¿ may seem like the most obvious thing in the world. Yet when we look at the historical development of television as a technological, social, and cultural form, we find that people have engaged with it in a variety of different ways. There is not, in other words, a single right way to watch TV. This is because television itself has undergone transformations on all of these levels: Technologically, changes such as those from black-and-white to color, analog to digital, standard to high-definition, and broadcast to cable to interactive all play a role in changing our relation to what ¿television¿ is. Socially, changes in television¿s integration in corporate and industrial structures, its mediation of political realities, and its ability to reflect and shape our interactions with one another all play a role in transforming who ¿we¿ as viewers are. And culturally, varieties of programming including live broadcasting, prerecorded content, and on-demand streaming of news, movies, sit-coms, and prestige dramas series all indicate differences and distinctions in what it means to ¿watch¿ TV. In this course, we will engage with these and other aspects of television as a medium in order to rethink not only how but why we watch TV.

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.

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.