FILMSTUD 150: Cinema and the City (FILMSTUD 350)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2009
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
FILMSTUD 157: Film Noir from Bogart to Mulholland Drive (FILMSTUD 357)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
Instructors:
Vernallis, C. (PI)
FILMSTUD 164A: Technology and the Visual Imagination (ARTHIST 164A, ARTHIST 364A, FILMSTUD 364A)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
FILMSTUD 165A: Fashion Shows: From Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga (ARTHIST 165A, ARTHIST 365A, FILMSTUD 365A)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Kessler, E. (PI)
FILMSTUD 167B: Beyond the Fuzzy-Techie Divide: Art, Science, Technology (ARTHIST 167, ARTHIST 367, FILMSTUD 367B)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
Instructors:
Kessler, E. (PI)
FILMSTUD 220: Being John Wayne
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.
Last offered: Spring 2009
FILMSTUD 250B: Bollywood and Beyond: An Introduction to Indian Film (COMPLIT 247, ICA 250)
A broad engagement with Indian cinema: its relationship with Indian politics, history, and economics; its key thematic concerns and forms; and its adaptation of and response to global cinematic themes, genres, and audiences. Locating the films within key critical and theoretical debates and scholarship on Indian and world cinemas. Goal is to open up what is often seen as a dauntingly complex region, especially for those who are interested in but unfamiliar with its histories and cultural forms.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Mediratta, S. (PI)
FILMSTUD 251: Media in Transition
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2010
FILMSTUD 290: Movies and Methods-The Judy Garland Seminar (FILMSTUD 490)
Judy Garland was one of the most accomplished performers of her time, her seeming naturalism a function of her fierce discipline. Her career straddled multiple media: film, recording, live performance and television. From childhood, her life was lived in the public eye, and her personal travails were as well known as the characters she incarnated on screen. In fact, her biography informs some of her later film roles. Garland's work in this period occurs primarily in two genres: the musical and the melodrama, and some of her best films were directed by Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor. The intersections between star, genre, and director. Both a mainstream star and a gay cult icon, Garland's persona was read differently by different audiences; the reception of Garland and her significance to audiences then and now.This is a required course for graduating Film and Media Studies majors. Remaining enrollment (open to both graduates and undergraduates) will be by permission of instructor. Capstone course for majors.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Bukatman, S. (PI)
FILMSTUD 297: Honors Thesis Writing
May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
1 times
(up to 5 units total)
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