COURSES
FALL 2008
FSCP81000 – Aesthetics of Film, Professor Edward D. Miller, Tuesday, 11:45am-3:45 pm, Room C419, 3 credits [93131] Cross listed with THEA 71400, ART 79400 & MALS 77100
Ever since the Lumière Brother’s train arrived at the station, film has
been concerned with its own mechanics and meanings and the ways in which
film not only captures the moment but transforms it, creating an impact
upon its audience with distinct aesthetics.
This course highlights the self-referentiality of film and argues that a
central aspect of the cinematic enterprise is the depiction of the
filmmaking environment itself through the "meta-film."
Using this emphasis as an entry into aesthetics, the course involves
students in graduate-level film discourse by providing them with a
thorough understanding of the concepts that are needed to perform a
detailed formal analysis.
The course’s main text is the eighth edition of Bordwell and Thompson’s
Film Art and the book is used to examine such key topics as narrative
and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scene, composition, cinematography, camera
movement, set design/location, color, duration, editing, sound/music, and
genre.
In addition, we read Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" in order to develop an understanding of the
relationship between aesthetics and technology. We also read brief
selections from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in order
to underline the affectivity of aesthetics.
In the final section of the course, we examine the challenges that digital
culture has brought to the aesthetics of the once entirely analog medium
of cinema. Thus we discern the effects of computer generated imagery (CGI)
on the appearance of cinema as well as the ramifications of what Henry
Jenkins has named "convergence culture" on the cinematic arts.
We ask how is the medium transformed when films are watched on a tiny iPod
screen or accessed via YouTube.
In addition, as many films are now shot using digital video—and are edited
using nonlinear programs such as Final Cut Pro—we investigate how the
changes in production and post-production environments are dramatically
changing the look and sound of cinema. We read selections from Lev
Manovich’s Language of New Media and query his notion of digital
cinema and the database logic in order to determine if the listing and
looping of the database is indeed becoming an organizing principle for
film, challenging the traditional causality of narrative structure.
As part of the course we cross genres and construct our own database of
films that focus on the landscape and soundscape of the filmmaking terrain
and highlight the aesthetics of cinema.
As such, we watch Thanhouser and Marston’s Evidence of the Film
(1913), Charlie Chaplin’s The Masquerader (1914), Dziga Vertov’s
Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard
(1950), Donen and Kelly’s Singing in the Rain (1952), Jean Rouch’s
Chronicle of a Summer (1960). Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963),
François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Robert Altman’s The
Player (1991), Tom DeCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995), P.T.
Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1998), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
(2001), and Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002). We also
look at the formal conventions of the "making of" documentary, now
included as a subfeature on so many DVD versions of films.
Students are expected to write short weekly response papers to the
readings and screenings. The 12-15 page final paper is a critical analysis
of a film that foregrounds the filmmaking process itself.
Enrollment is limited. No permits, non-matrics, auditors.
FSCP81000 – Film History I,
Professor Matthew Solomon, Wednesday, 11:45am-3:45pm, Room C-419, 3
credits [93132] Cross listed with THEA 71500, ART 79500 & MALS 77200
This course is an intensive examination of
film history before 1930 that introduces students to international silent
cinema, to the scholarly literature on early cinema, and to the practices
of researching and writing film history.
Topics for our consideration include the "emergence of cinema"; the
"cinema of attractions"; the "narrativization" of cinema; theater and
early film; sound, color, and the "silent" image; the industrialization of
film production; national cinemas of the 1910s; the Hollywood mode of
filmmaking; women and African-American filmmakers; and film movements of
the 1920s.
We will study the work of such filmmakers as Lumière, Méliès, Porter,
Paul, Bauer, Christensen, Feuillade, Weber, Micheaux, Murnau, Dulac,
Eisenstein, and others while considering the ways that silent films were
exhibited and received in diverse contexts.
Students will write a 15+ page seminar paper on a research topic of their
choosing that has been approved by the professor and will conduct a
smaller-scale historical research project making use of archival
resources. In addition, students are expected to complete assigned
readings detailed in the syllabus and to actively participate in class
discussions.
FSCP 81000–Film Noir in Context: From Expressionism to Neo-Noir, Professor Morris Dickstein, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [93133] Cross listed with THEA 81500
This course will explore the style,
sensibility, and historical context of film noir.
After tracing its origins in German expressionism, French "poetic
realism," American crime movies, the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell
Hammett and James M. Cain, and the cinematography and narrative structure
of Citizen Kane, we will examine some of the key films noirs of the
period between John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon of 1941 and
Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958.
These will include such works as Double Indemnity, Mildred
Pierce, Out of the Past, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt,
In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy, The Killers, DOA,
Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat, and Kiss Me Deadly.
We’ll explore the visual style of film noir, the importance of the urban
setting, the portrayal of women as lure, trophy, and betrayer, and the
decisive social impact or World War II and the cold war. We’ll also
examine the role played by French critics in defining and revaluing this
style, and touch upon its influence on French directors like Melville (Second
Breath), Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player), and Chabrol (La
Femme Infidele, Le Boucher).
Finally, we’ll look at the post-1970s noir revival in America in such
films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Body Heat, and
Red Rock West. Readings will include materials on the historical
background of this style, key critical and theoretical texts on film noir
by Paul Scrader, Carlos Clarens, James Naremore, Alain Silver and others,
and the work of some hard-boiled fiction by writers such as Dashiell
Hammett, James M. Cain, David Goodis, and Patricia Highsmith.
Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a
15-page research paper.
FSCP 81000 – The Films of Luchino Visconti – Professor Joe McElhaney, Tuesday, 4:15-8:15pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [93134] Cross listed with THEA 81500
A seminal filmmaker in the birth of Italian neo-realism, Luchino Visconti’s body of work (in film as well as in opera and theater) intersects with a number of major issues in relation to post-war European culture.
This course will examine Visconti’s
career from a variety of different perspectives and screen nearly all of
his films. Crucial to the concerns of the course will be Visconti’s
relationship to traditions of cinematic, theatrical and literary realism,
traditions within which Visconti has often been a controversial figure.
Much of this controversy revolved around what were often felt to be the
excessive residual effects of a melodramatic sensibility on the form and
structure of the films.
Such charges have also been leveled against his process of adapting works
from the canon of nineteenth and twentieth century European literature
(Dostoevsky, Camus, Mann, Maupassant) in which "great literature" has
often been reduced to either a purely illustrative or conventional
dramatic function. But these theatricalizing and melodramatic elements are
no less crucial and no less historically significant than realism for
understanding Visconti’s filmmaking practice and its relationship to
post-war art cinema.
For Visconti, melodrama and the theatrical often existed in a dialectical rather than contradictory relationship to realism. Moreover, melodrama for Visconti was the very essence of the theatrical and the dramatic.
Throughout the semester, close attention
will be paid to the historical and cultural moments surrounding the
production and reception of the films, with particular attention given to
Visconti’s increased concern with questions of history and of historical
and cultural decadence, and to the process of literary adaptation.
Careful attention will also be paid to the precise form of the individual
films themselves: camera movement, staging of action, performance, set and
costume design, lighting, and music as well as other elements of the
soundtrack.
Visconti’s co-ordination of all of these leads to one of the most complex,
imaginative and voluptuous visual styles in the history of cinema.
Course requirements: Students are required to submit a final term paper of
approximately twenty pages in length. The papers may address any number of
issues in relation to the films. Close formal analysis is certainly
encouraged but students are also welcome to do research on other matters,
including the relationship between Visconti’s theater productions and his
work in cinema; to explore Visconti’s relationship to the post-war Italian
and European cultural scene; to address the films’ treatment of sexuality;
to examine the implications of Visconti’s literary adaptations, and so on.
This paper must be discussed with me in advance, followed by a formal
written proposal of approximately two to three pages.
Reading list and syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
FSCP 81000 – Contemporary Hispanic Cinema - Professor Nora Glickman, Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits [93135] Cross listed with THEA 81500
The films shown in this course explore through documentaries, fictional
accounts and criticism, the migrations of peoples in and out of the
Hispanic world from North Africa, Spain, England, the Caribbean, the U.S.
and South America. They examine upheavals caused by wars, military
dictatorships, economic hardships, religious and ideological persecutions.
The films shown are renditions of historical events, literary adaptations
and documentaries. I will try to have most of the films available to the
students at the reserve room (except for those films borrowed for two
weeks from the Cervantes’ Institute).
Students are responsible for reading the assigned material prior to each
session. Students will make brief presentations on the material covered
during the course and will write a final comparative paper based either on
a film not seen in class, or only partially discussed during the semester.
Required text: Crossing Continental Bridges: Cinematic and Literary
Representations of Spanish and Latin American Themes, Editors: Nora
Glickman and Alejandro Varderi, Tucson: Chasqui Press. Arizona U.
Press, 2005
The videos and DVDs belong to Prof. Glickman and will be at the reserve
library. Most films are also available at the Cervantes Institute.
Reading list and syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office
(Room 5109).
This course will investigate films and literary narratives from the USA, Brazil and the Caribbean from the last 70 years of the 20th century.
The concept of Baroque as applied here refers to the broad inclusion of different artistic and cultural elements as well as multiple constructive principles within the same work.
Historical and cultural events such as the Good Neighbor Policy and the appearance of new cultural identities will be treated within a hemispheric perspective.
Filmmakers include Orson Welles, Glauber Rocha. Olivers Stone, and Tomas Gutierrez Alea, among others. Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Vinicius de Moraes and Senel Paz are some of the writers to be examined.
The Brazilian cultural movement Tropicália will also be discussed. Attention will be paid to theories of the New World Baroque proposed by Carlos Fuentes, Jose Lezama Lima, Edouard Glissant, Lois Zamora, and others.
Tentative List of Film Studies Courses Spring 2009
Film History II –Jerry Carlson
Film Theory – Amy Herzog
Queer Culture, Theory and Media – David Gerstner (T, 2:00-6:00)
Science Fiction Film & Television – Heather Hendershot
Theatricality in Film – Ivone Margulies (M or W, 4:15-8:15)
PAST COURSES:
Spring 2008;Fall 2007;Spring 2007;Fall 2006;Spring 2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005; Fall 2004; Spring 2004: Fall 2003;Spring 2003; Fall 2002; Spring 2002; Fall 2001; Spring 2001;Fall 2000;Spring 2000; Fall 1999; Spring 1999; Fall 1998