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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.

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

We live in an information age, and information comes to us through various media. But different media ¿embody¿ information differently, and are experienced differently. How do these differences impact the ways we come to understand the world and our place in it? One example: Photography, cinema, and console games all attempt to communicate the experience of war, but each does so in its own way -- a Robert Capa photograph of the moment when a soldier is shot is different from the sensory and narrative immersion of Saving Private Ryan, which is different from the interactive experience of Call of Duty. nnFollowing Marshall McLuhan¿s dictum that ¿the medium is the message,¿ this course will examine the ways that different media present, organize, and structure information as forms that are ¿read¿ or experienced. The course will consider such historical media as illuminated books, print, painting, and photography, and such recent forms as cinema, television, comics, presentation software, and interactive and computational media. Readings will be drawn from across disciplines, and will include McLuhan, Sontag, Merleau-Ponty, Goffman, Jenkins, Hayles, and others. Fiction, film screenings, and comics reading will also be part of the course.

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 Linda Williams' thesis of body genres to Jeffrey Sconce's notion of haunted media.

This is a hands-on course situated at the intersection of theory and practice of sound and image. Select readings in film, video, and digital media theory, as well as screenings and class discussions, will pave the way for a number of thematically focused practical exercises in ¿analytic audio-vision.¿nnTopics and individual and group assignments will vary from quarter to quarter. Combining creative expression and aesthetic/interpretive inquiry, the class has no prerequisites and is open to all students.

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 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.

CPT course required for international students completing degree.

Judy Garland, an icon of American popular culture, was one of the most accomplished performers of her time. Both a mainstream star and a gay cult figure, Garland's career straddled 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. Her seeming naturalism was a function of fierce discipline. Garland's work in this period occurs primarily in two genres: musical comedy and melodrama (and what we might call the melodramatic musical). Some of her best films were directed by two of the foremost studio directors ¿ Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor ¿ intersections of star, genre, and director will inform the seminar, as will explorations of Garland's work on television and the concert stage. Acting and performance have been prominent in cinema throughout the medium's history, but have received relatively little attention in film studies. A course dedicated to Judy Garland proposes, first, that we attend to the centrality of performance in film, and, further, that the work Garland produced across three decades demonstrates not only a coherence and consistency, but also a variety and richness, that merits close examination. The seminar would be useful to students in American Studies, Art History, Film Studies, Music Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, as well as Gender and Sexuality Studies.