This course will introduce students to graduate-level film analysis by acquainting them with basic film vocabulary, techniques, and styles. Central topics for study will include narrative structure and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scene and shot composition, camera movement, editing (continuity and montage technique), and sound. Students will also be introduced to a variety of critical approaches to film analysis, including narrative, genre, auteur, industry, technology, and reception. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with the fundamentals of research in Cinema Studies and the essential bibliographic and archival sources for research and analysis.

Required texts:

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies

Recommended texts: 

Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink, The Cinema Book (2^nd edition)
John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies
Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds. Film and Theory: An Anthology
Graeme Turner, ed. The Film Cultures Reader

Additional readings (selected essays from journals and other collections) will be on reserve in the library.

Screenings will be drawn from the following films (the following list is a representative selection; it is not the final screening list):

Boudu Saved from Drowning (Renoir, 1932)
Citizen Kane  (Welles, 1941)
Contempt (Godard, 1963)
Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989)
La Haine  (Kassovitz, 1996)
M (Lang, 1931)
Memento  (Nolan, 2000)
Orlando  (Potter, 1993)
Potemkin  (Eisenstein, 1925)
Rear Window  (Hitchcock, 1954)
Stagecoach  (Ford, 1939)
The Man With a Movie Camera  (Vertov, 1929)
Touch of Evil  (Welles, 1958)

Course Requirements:

(1) Short Essay: 5-6 page close textual analysis of selected film. (30%)
(2) Presentation: Short in-class presentation of final paper topic. (10%)
(3) Final Paper: 10–15 page analysis of selected film. (50%)
(4) Participation: Attendance and in-class participation in discussion. (10%)

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

This class will provide an overview of significant movements, debates, and figures in film theory. Readings will span both classical and contemporary film theory, addressing a range of approaches including realism, structuralism, auteur theory, genre criticism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist and critical race theories, and third cinema.

The class will examine writings on cinema in their historical and national contexts, looking at the ways in which film theory intersects with political, cultural, and aesthetic trends. The final sessions of the course will focus on recent developments in film theory, in particular the debates surrounding cognitive approaches to film, the evolution of digital technology, and the writings of the controversial philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In each case, new theoretical work on cinema will be read in relation to the complex history of film criticism.

In addition, the class will examine the field of film theory alongside related fields of aesthetics and representation (e.g. art history and photography, television studies, cultural studies, visual studies, postmodernism), exploring the ways these disciplines have overlapped.

Each seminar meeting will involve close analyses of readings related to a particular topic or theme. We will discuss the contexts within which these writings emerged, and the institutional frameworks that provided for the evolution of the field. Written texts will be read alongside specific cinematic examples.

Students will be required to screen at least one film per week outside class (independently, or preferably in groups). We will view additional shorts and review clips in class. Ideally, students will also view supplemental films that are suggested, and attend screenings and discussions in venues around the city.

Students will be responsible for six weekly response papers, to engage more deeply with the heavy reading load, and as a means of invigorating class participation. They will also be asked to complete a longer research project on a topic of their choice, in consultation with the instructor.

Course Requirements: Response Papers (six, 2-3 pages each): 30%; Participation: 10%; Research Paper (15-20 pages): 60%. Screenings: Students will be required to watch one film before class each week. Additional films will be screened in class, along with clips to be viewed for close analysis.

Text: Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 6th Ed. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004). Additional readings will be available via electronic reserve.

(A sample syllabus is available in the Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109.)

Cultural stereotypes and clichés of blacks as inept and clownish were rife in the illustrated press at the time (the turn of the century) that the earliest films were brief and cheap to produce, allowing for a range and variety of imagery that quickly overwhelmed the most compelling racial stereotypes on stage and in performance. In the teens, as the U.S. film industry began to consolidate Westward in California, there was the emergence of a powerful new set of racial stereotypes mobilized around the perception of slavery as having been most beneficial for all concerned, culminating in such films as Gone with the Wind in 1939.

In the meanwhile, in the 20s and 30s, the U.S. film industry remained capable of a modicum of diversity and self-contradiction as black entertainers and peoples of color were becoming internationally famous for their extraordinary gifts as musicians, dancers and performers. Some of the performers in this list would include Jack Johnson, Noble Johnson, Mme. Sul-te-Wan, Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington, Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, Anna Mae Wong, Nina Mae McKinney, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters.

The intention of the course will be to weave together the histories of African American recorded music, movies, theatre and performance in a manner designed to enrich the traditional negative stereotype perspective on race images in U.S. cinema. We will endeavor to collectively produce a fuller, less antagonistic and more satisfying understanding of the hybridic nature of technologically produced modern popular culture.

The requirements would be class attendance, as well as completing the assigned readings and viewings. The final assignment will be a c15-20 page paper on a pre-approved topic drawn either from required films or recommended films and performance.

(Listings of readings and films to be screened available in the Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109.)

FSCP 81000 -- Film History: Part Three -- Professor Ying Zhu, Tuesday, 11:45am-3:45pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [90142] Cross listed with THEA 81500 & ART 89500

This seminar surveys the development of world narrative fiction film from geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geoaesthetic perspectives. It traces the institutional as well as the stylistic evolutions of world cinema since the 1970s.

It examines major cinematic events, movements, and developments within national and regional film industries of varying political, economic and cultural milieus. While an exhaustive coverage is not the goal, the course does seek to traverse a few distinctive geographic terrains including new and planet Hollywood, New German Cinema, British Cinema, Iranian Cinema, Latin America cinema, and Asian popular cinema.

Within each nation/region, our survey highlights major trends in film style including both the commercial and the art waves and film practice including the organization of film production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as film policy involving censorship, regulation, and classification.

Assignments: Attendance (10%): Regular attendance and active participation in seminar discussions.

Weekly reading report (40%): Each student is required to write, on a weekly basis, a one-page, single-spaced abstract of a selected reading that summarizes the central questions of the material; On a second page, each student will submit two questions/comments s/he would like the seminar to consider during that week discussion. 

Research paper (50%): 20 pages; paper proposal and bibliography due on week nine; presentation on final week of the seminar.

(Syllabus and reading list available in the Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109)

Please note: This course is an elective, not one of the required film history courses.

FSCP 81000 -- Documenting the Self: Performance in Nonfiction Film -- Professor Edward D. Miller, Wednesday, 11:45am-3:45pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [90144] Cross listed with THEA 81500 & ART 89500

This course will examine the flowering of Italian cinema after World War II and its transformation in the 1960s by focusing on the best work of five leading directors, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, and Fellini. It will explore the historical, social, and theoretical roots of Neorealism and the different ways each of these directors participated in this movement and was in turn influenced by it.

The course will begin with documentary-style films they made within the ambit of Neorealism, such as Rossellini's Rome - Open City and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and then show some of the directions they took in their later work, which focused less on the harsh lives of the poor and more on the malaise of the middle class, and was often more personal, more psychological, more historical, more operatic, or more theatrical.

There will be readings by theorists of Neorealism, such as Zavattini and Lizzani, and by sympathetic critics in other countries, including André Bazin and James Agee. The course will conclude by exploring the work of important younger directors who first emerged in the 1960s, including Pasolini, Olmi, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, and Scola.

Course requirements: Students will be expected to see the film(s) to be discussed between classes, to deliver an oral report, and to research and submit a term paper.