FSCP 81000/THEA71400/ART79400/MALS 77100, Aesthetics of Film, Professor Stuart Liebman, Thursday, 2:00-5:00pm, 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-scPne, 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. The major course texts are: David Bordwell/Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2003)--and Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor (Princeton U.P., 1988) Some key historical and theoretical primary texts, as well as others focusing on contextualizing single films, will also be assigned. Whenever possible, books and articles will be placed on reserve.

Course requirements: One long critical research paper about a film to be chosen by the student in consultation with the instuctor. Depending on class size, there may also be short presentations by students. Attendance, keeping up with the readings, and contributing to ongoing discussion is crucial.

Enrollment limited. No permits, non-matrics, auditors.

FSCP 81000/THEA 81500 – Comedy: Method and Meaning, Professor Morris Dickstein, Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits

This course will take a historical, critical, and theoretical approach to the evolution of film comedy. It will begin with short films and longer works by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, showing how film comedy develops from slapstick, sight gags, pantomime, farce, and other vaudeville routines to more complex forms of drama, pathos, and characterization.

We will examine some of the major comic performers of the 1930s, including the Marx brothers, W. C. Fields, and Mae West, in the context of their times, and explore works of screwball comedy by directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Gregory La Cava, as well as a parallel tradition of sophisticated or cynical romantic comedy by Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder.

Along the way we’ll compare the work of American directors to European counterparts like Rene Clair (Le Million, A Nous la Liberte) and Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved from Drowning, Rules of the Game).

Later material may include the work of TV comedians like Ernie Kovacs, Lucille Ball, and Sid Caesar and feature films such as Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964), M*A*S*H (Altman,1970), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), and My Favorite Year (Richard Benjamin,1982).

There will be readings of works of comic literature from Shakespeare to Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov, along with theoretical writings on comedy by Henri Bergson and others.

Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a 15-page research paper.

FSCP 81000/THEA 81500 -- Studies in Film Authorship, Professor David A. Gerstner, Wednesday, 2:00-5:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits

This course investigates the concept of ‘film authorship’ as it developed in the cinema studies discipline. Through readings and screenings (focused on one filmmaker, Gus Van Sant) the seminar interrogates the multiple ways and reasons why film authorship persists in the field.

The course takes as its start point my recent work in the Routledge/AFI anthology, Authorship and Film, to trace and understand how the concept of ‘film authorship’ came to be produced and why it has maintained its significance and appeal.

‘Studies in Film Authorship’ is designed as a seminar. The emphasis on a single filmmaker will focus our discussions on the authorial concept particularly since a figure such as Van Sant raises not only thematic issues (mise-en-scène, genre, style), his work provocatively renders ideological concerns associated with cultural production (gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, Hollywood vs. independent production, and authorial presence-identity).

In this way, the seminar takes up traditional studies of the auteur while simultaneously engaging contemporary issues in queer theory, race studies, and feminism. Some key questions thus posed in the class: Why is it relevant to study the film author? What is its historical significance in film studies and the arts in general? What broader concepts are at stake (ideologically, creatively, politically)? Is it possible to develop a methodology that studies film authorship not only as an examination of the text as such but also one that draws upon historical evidences, ideological concerns, and philosophical inquiry?

Additionally, though the class is anchored in film studies, many of the writers (as well as the filmmaker under discussion) brought to the seminar table draw upon a wide range of art and media to query the "author-function" (to borrow Foucault’s terms). From Walter Benjamin’s theatrically-rooted "Author as Producer" to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian "author-creator" to Peter Wollen’s symphonic metaphor in his work on the auteur, the author-concept in cinema studies evolves from ideas generated in other disciplines such as painting, music, performance, and literature. Hence, students will consider both the film-specific model of film authorship and film’s strong interdisciplinary relationship to the other arts.

Readings for the semester include the works of François Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Oscar Wilde, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Michael Baxandall, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Wollen, Jane Gaines, Janet Staiger, David Gerstner, Pam Cook, Claire Johnston, Judith Mayne, Judith Butler, Marlon Riggs, Sarah Projansky, and Kent A. Ono.


Students will be asked, each week, to complete readings, attend screenings, and submit a one-page response paper that will facilitate our class discussion and supplement the instructor’s lecture on the week’s material. A final 15-page paper is due at the end of the semester.

FSCP 81000/THEA 81500 – Cultural Theory and the Documentary, Professor Alison Griffiths, Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits

Cultural Theory and the Documentary is a lecture/seminar course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory. Methodologically, the course aims to expose students to cultural theorists who can help shed new light on both canonical and obscure documentary texts.

The course is organized around three key topics: the documentary archive and the ethnographic gaze; national identity and documentary aesthetics; and experimental and postcolonial documentary practice.

Cultural Theory and the Documentary offers students a broad introduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism.

Films screened in class will encompass the following genres: silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and popular Imax films. The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spaces and evoke discourses of "truth," "realism," and "authenticity" through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings. These terms are subjected to critical scrutiny throughout the course as students come to appreciate the paradoxical nature of the term "documentary realism."

A short mid-term essay (6-7pp; 20%) and a research paper (15pp; 60%) are required, as well as a reading response seminar presentation (10%) and final class presentation (10%).

The midterm requires students to read two of the films screened in class (or two pre-approved substitutes) against, alongside, or in tension with at least two theoretical readings assigned in class.

The reading response presentation consists of a 10 minute critical response to the week’s readings in which students lead seminar discussion based on 3-4 ideas drawn from the readings.

An abstract for the research topic is submitted half way through the course and a topic developed in consultation with the professor. Syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).