FALL 2002 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
THEA 71400/ART 79500/MALS 77100--Aesthetics of Film
Professor Elisabeth Weis
Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419, 3 credits
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. Information: filmstudies@gc.cuny.edu
THEA 81500/ART 89500--Eisenstein: Politics, Theatre, Film, Theory
Professor Stuart Liebman
Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
This course will focus on the artistic and ideological complex which are the films and film theoretical writings of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, arguably the greatest filmmaker and film theorist of the former Soviet Union.
All his films including Strike [1924-5], October [1927-8], The General Line (Old and New) [1928] through Alexander Nevsky [1938] and the two parts of Ivan the Terrible [1944 and 1946/58] will be analyzed in detail, as will major parts of his theoretical writings and his autobiography, Beyond the Stars.
Great care will be taken to situate Eisenstein in the artistic currents of his times. The work of Constructivist artists, photographers and theorists, such as Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gan, Lissitzky, Arvatov, Popova, and Stepanova, will be closely examined. The great influences on his theatrical work, primarily Vsevolod Meyerhold and, but also Foregger and the FEKS group, among others, will also be carefully considered.
The writings about and for the cinema by Formalist theorists and avant-garde writers such as Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Tynianov, Jakobson, Mayakovsky, Babel and Pilnyak, among others, will also be scrutinized. Finally, the political, institutional, and econommic context in the Soviet period, from the "heroic" period following the Revolution to the gradual descent into the oppressive high Stalinist era, will constantly anchor our discussions.
All films will be placed on reserve and students will be expected to screen them prior to class. Several slide lectures will provide necessary artistic background. Research papers will be required. Seminar presentations will be optional. Knowledge of Russian is not required, although knowledge of it, or of Italian, French, and German into which many Russian texts have been translated, will be useful. Enrollment will be limited to twelve (12) students. Information: sliebman@gc.cuny.edu
THEA 81500/WSCP 81000--The History of Lesbian and Gay Experimental
Film Before Video--CANCELLED
Professor Sarah Schulman
Tuesday, 4:15-6:15pm, Room C419, 3 credits
Beginning with Thomas Edison's Sound Experiment of two men dancing, lesbian and gay images are as old as the history of cinema. As with all new art ideas, form and technological innovation in film historically originates in the margins and then is integrated by the center. The creative explosion that has been the evolution of gay and lesbian identity in the 20th century was accompanied at every turn by visual discovery and formal invention evident in the film works created out of this cultural transformation.
In this course, we will look at both gay and lesbian images, and gay and lesbian perspectives, as articulated in Experimental Film. We will view representational examples from Eisenstein's homoerotic unedited Mexico footage, to Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, from Curt MacDowell's Loads, to Stu Friedrich's First Comes Love. In terms of content and image, we will see how gay people have expressed their condition, and most importantly -- how experimental structures can covey the gay and lesbian experience in ways that conventional narrative cannot.
Readings include catalogs and program notes from fourteen years of the MIX Festival, plus articles and interviews with makers whose works originated in MIX and were then shown in The Whitney Biennial, The Berlin Film Festival, and other global venues.
SARAH SCHULMAN, author of seven novels and two non-fiction books, is the co-founder of MIX: The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now in its fourteenth year) and curated the festival from 1987-1993. Information: Sarah Schulman.
THEA 81500--Hollywood-Paris-Hollywood
Professor Louis Menand
Tuesday, 6:30-8:30pm, Room C419, 3 credits
ENROLLMENT LIMITED. PERMISSION OF PROGRAM
REQUIRED. CONTACT mfrisque@gc.cuny.edu
FOR DETAILS.
This course will cover Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s that influenced French New Wave directors, then French New Wave films and other French movies of the 1950s and early 1960s that had an influence on American directors, then Hollywood "New Wave" movies after 1967--Bonnie and Clyde and into the 1970s (Scorsese, Altman, Copolla, etc.).
The context would be the import-export character of this cultural exchange, which has parallels in other areas; the economics of the film industry after 1945; the post-war politics of American-French relations; and relevant developments in film theory and criticism.
Films to be studied include: The Trouble with Harry, The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, The 400 Blows, Breathless, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Mean Streets, The Conversation, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Readings: Cahiers du cinema: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollwood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier; Cahiers du cinema: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, ed.Hillier; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience; Dwight Macdonald, On Movies; Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema; Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies. Information: lmenand@gc.cuny.edu
THEA 81500/WSCP 81000--Theatricality in Film
Professor Ivone Margulies
Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419. 3 credits
This course on theatricality in film asks the following question: how do certain traits of theater -- such as enhanced physicality, visible proscenium, spatial convergence, marked blocking, excessive gesture, emphasis on text, tableau formations, direct audience address-- bring into cinema a reciprocal framing of "natural" and "artificial." Theatricality in film is intrinsically related to a thematization of truth.
The course examines what distinguishes sincerity from artifice, audience from scene, catharsis from distanciation, one version of the self from another in particular films. The course will discuss: the historical and philosophical roots of an anti-theatrical prejudice; dramaturgical analogies for social interaction (the notion of mimicry in social formation and of social front and stigma in Goffman); notions of acting out in psychoanalysis and in psychodrama; the association of theatricality and femininity (Femininity as masquerade, hysteria, excess); the notion of liininality.
The course will also introduce the main arguments on the distinction between theatre and film and how cinema has appropriated theatre.
The course will present and discuss films involved in farce and disguise (Lubitch's To Be or Not to Be, Chaplin's The Great Dictator); Confessional modes in film and the relation of cinema verité with psychodrama (Chronicle of a Summer, Peggy' Ahwesh's Doppleganger, Ann Robertson's diary films, Warhol's portraits); ritual possession and ethnographic film (Les Maitres Fous); films that explicitly use the theater as the setting for possession and the transformation of the self (Cassavetes' Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence); the use of the theatre and acting to question notions of artifice and sincerity (The Golden Coach, Mohsen Makbalbaff's Salaam Cinema); the notion of reenactment and moral exemplarity in film (Zavatnni/Maselli and Antonioni's episodes in Love in the City, Kiarostami's Close Up, Jhang Yuan's Sons).
Reading list available in Certificate Programs office (Room 5109). Information: Ivone Margulies