1 - 10 of 18 results for: FILMSTUD

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.

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.

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 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.

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.