FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
FALL 2000 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Theatre 71400 - Aesthetics of Film. GC, Thurs, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor Elizabeth Weis {Cross-Listed with Art 79500 & MALS 77100}
This course introduces students to graduate-level film analysis by acquainting them with basic film techniques, strategies, and styles. Central topics to be studied include narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scène, composition, camera movement, editing, sound and music, genre, and spectatorship.
In addition, students will become familiar with a variety of critical perspectives on film as well as the essential bibliographical sources and fundamentals of research in the field.
Theatre 71600 - History of Cinema II: 1930 to the Present. GC, Wed, 6:30-9:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Morris Dickstein {Cross-listed with ART 79500 & MALS 77200}
Concentrating on major tendencies in film history since the early 1930s through a close examination of individual works, this course will deal with such subjects as German film just before the rise of Hitler, Hollywood movies during the Depression, French cinema before the war, film noir and other postwar Hollywood styles, Italian Neorealism, Hollywood in the1950s, the rise of the New Wave and other modernist tendencies in the fifties and sixties, the emergence of new young directors in America and Germany during the 1970s, and finally the rise of the American independent cinema.
Films will include works by Lang, Lubitsch, Capra, Renoir, Welles, Rossellini, Kazan, Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Fassbinder, and Scorsese. Emphasis will be placed on the achievements of individual directors, on changes in studio style and the machinery of production, and on the major historical currents of each period. There will be readings from contemporary documents and key film histories.
Text: David Cook, A History of the Narrative Film, 3rd ed. (Norton)
See also: Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Columbia);
Schatz, The Genius of the System (Pantheon)
Theatre 81500 - Eyes on the Sparrow: Race & Gender in U.S. Cinema, 1930's through the 1950's. GC, Tues, 4:15-7:15 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Michele Wallace {Cross-listed with WSCP 81000}
This course will look at issues of race, gender and sexuality as they were handled by the mainstream commercial studio films from the time of their heyday in the 30s through their gradual decline in the early 60s.
During these years, the most distinguishing feature upon the few occasions in which blacks were allowed to play central roles in Hollywood movies was the struggle against what were perceived as too exageratedly jovial and stereotypical black characters. Each of these films, not just the ones directed by black director Ocar Micheaux, sets out to accomplish a level of seriousness around issues of race and its conjunction with gender and sexuality that is at that time still seemed unprecendented. What's clear, is that everyone is a lot more lucid about what to avoid and a good deal less so when it comes to determining how the black image will be different and yet an integral of the whole. On the whole, an interesting bunch of films made in interesting times.
As for assigments, my suggestion would be one longish paper (15 pages) at the end and perhaps a very brief oral presentation.
Theatre 81500 - Constructivism & Cinema: The Films and Film Theory of Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov. GC, Mon, 6:30-9:30 p.m., 3 credits. Prof. Stuart Liebman {Cross-listed with Art 89500}
This course will focus on the complex artistic and ideological relationships between selected films and film theoretical writings by Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov and many central monuments and spectacles of the Soviet Union's cultural production during the first decade after the revolution.
Films to be analyzed in detail will include Eisenstein's Strike [1924-5], October [1927-8], and The General Line (Old and New)[1928]; Pudovkin's Mother [1926] and The End of St. Petersburg [1927]; and Vertov's Kino Glaz [1924], One Sixth of the World [1926], The Eleventh Year [1928], Man with a Movie Camera [1929] and Enthusiasm [1931].
These works will be examined in the light of aesthetic debates among the constructivists, including Alexander Rodchenko, Boris Arvatov, the Stenberg Brothers, Vesnin, Malevich and Tatlin in the visual arts, as well as literary and theatrical figures and critics such as Trotsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Sergei Tretyakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Readings will include selected primary texts by all of the names mentioned, with particular emphasis on Eisenstein's Writings 1922-1934 [BFI/Indiana U.P.1988], Pudovkin's Film Technique [1929] and Film Acting [1937] [Grove Press, 1970], Kuleshov on Film (University of California Press, 1974), and Vertov's Kino-Eye (University of California Press, 1984). In addition, a number of contemporary historical and critical articles and books by Christina Lodder, Annette Michelson, Richard Taylor, Orlando Figes, David Bordwell, Jacques Aumont and Boris Groys, among others, will be assigned.
Knowledge of Russian is not required, although knowledge of it, or of Italian, French, and/or German, into which many Russian texts have been translated, will be useful.
All films will be placed on reserve and students will be expected to screen them prior to class. Several slide lectures will provide necessary background. Seminar presentations and research papers will be required.
Enrollment will be limited to twelve (12) students.