SPRING SEMESTER 2004 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
THEA 71500/ART 79500/MALS 77200 History of Cinema I: 1895-1930, Professor Heather Hendershot, Thursday, 6:30-10:00pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
This is a course in the history and historiography of the silent cinema. Weekly screenings represent technological and artistic developments from 1895 through the transition to sound. Topics include the rise of the Hollywood studio system and the relation of modernist movements in the arts to German cinema, Soviet cinema, and French avant-garde cinema.
Selected essays by Sergei Eisenstein, Noël Burch, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, and others accompany films seen in class and focus upon spectatorship and the emergence of "classical style."
Enrollment limited to 21. No auditors, permits, non-matrics.
THEA 81600/ART 89500 Seminar in
Film Theory, Professor William Boddy, Wednesday, 4:15-6:30PM, Room C-419,
3 credits
This course will provide an overview of classical and contemporary film theory. Writers, whose contributions to the field will be examined, include Eisenstein, Arnheim, Epstein, Balazs, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, and Kracauer, among the earlier figures, and such contemporary theorists as Metz, Mitry, Baudry, Mulvey, Heath, and Carroll. Questions about the structure and function of the filmic "text," the nature of cinematic representation and film spectatorship raised by various schools of thought, including phenomenology, Marxism, semiology, psychoanalysis, and feminism will be considered.
Although attention is largely on primary theoretical writings, secondary texts and films that help to contextualize specific theories will be used as well.
FSCP 81000/MUS 81502 Film Music, Professor Royal Brown, Tuesday, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits
The course will examine the entire
phenomenon of film music and the technical,
artistic, aesthetic, psychological, and political
problems it poses. As an ongoing process, we
will track the evolution of film music and how
its metamorphoses run parallel to and diverge
from those in the art and commerce of the
cinema.
For the "classical" film score, we will
examine essential differences between film and
concert music. Scores will be studied in the
light of how the composer has solved both the
musical and dramatic problems at hand, and
we will discuss the ways in which varying
musical styles, from romantic to avant-garde,
have been deployed in the cinematic context.
In many instances, the musical score opens
doors onto deeper readings of the filmic text,
and we will explore some of the ways in which
this occurs.
The movement of film music into
non-classical areas, in particular pop and jazz,
will also be examined, as will the recent shift
towards electronics (synthesizers, sampling,
etc.) and new tendencies in film/music
interactions, such as the breakdown of the
distinction between source (diegetic) and
nondiegetic music.
Numerous examples from
films and scores will be presented in class.
Video copies of complete films, including
documentaries on composers such as Bernard
Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Toru Takemitsu,
and Georges Delerue, will be available for
viewing in the library.
When possible active
film composers will be invited to talk about
their work. We will also work directly from the
manuscript of at least one complete film score.
FSCP 81000 Magical Realism & Film in Global Perspective, Professor Jerry Carlson, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30PM, Room C-419, 3 credits
Closely associated with authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ben Okri, and Salman Rushdie, magical realism is recognized as one of the most important modes of prose fiction of the past fifty years.
Less well understood is its importance to global filmmaking.This course will investigate magical realism as a cultural and historical phenomenon of global storytelling.
Why has magical realism gained such importance and prominence in recent years? How is it related to globalization and to postmodernism? How do its aims change in relation to its places and times of origin in particular cultures? What are its shared formal characteristics? What are the specifically cinematic configurations of those characteristics? How does magical realism differ from but retain family resemblances to the supernatural and the fantastic? Indeed, how useful is the designation magical realism? A selection of films from around the world will be analyzed in light of these questions.
Films may include A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings (Cuba), The Exterminating
Angel (Mexico), Daughters of the Dust (USA),
and Time of the Gypsies (Yugoslavia).
Readings will include comparative examples of
prose fiction and theoretical writings by Alejo
Carpentier, Tvsetan Todorov, Frederic
Jameson, and others.
THEA 81500 Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film: From Thomas Edison to Todd Haynes, Professor Sarah Schulman, Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
Gay and lesbian filmic images a perspectives are as old as cinema itself. This class will review the history of gay and lesbian experimental cinema from silents to modern day. We will also explore heterosexual icons of experimental film, like Reifenstahl and Deren, and their profound influence on subsequent lesbian and gay cinema.
The class will focus on the differences between formal invention and conventional narrative structure, and how the significance of this dynamic in understanding lesbian and gay expression and representation.
Weekly screenings and discussion will include works by Edison, Weber and Watson, Williard Maas, Nazimova, Deren, Reifenstahl, Anger, Barbara Rubin, Jack Smith, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Curt McDowell, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Jim Hubbard, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, and Todd Haynes. Guest lectures on film history and technique.
THEA 81500 Alfred Hitchcock and his Legacy, Professor Robert Kapsis, Monday, 6:30-10:00pm, Room C-419, 3 credits
This course examines Alfred Hitchcock's
career as well as his legacy, with special
concern for how his influence is reflected in
the contemporary thriller genre. In the first
part, we will examine Alfred Hitchcock's
motion pictures as well as his popular
television series in relation to the network of
influences which combined to produce them,
including Hitchcock's personal eccentricities,
the contexts of the thriller genre, the film
industry, the film art world, and the wider
society.
In the second part, we will explore
how Hitchcock's work has influenced the
careers of important American directors,
especially Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg.
The centerpiece of this course is Multimedia Hitchcock (MH)---a dynamic interactive computer program originally developed for the Museum of Modern Art, as part of their celebration of the Hitchcock Centennial in 1999. Many written assignments will be based on materials drawn from the MH program.
SEE ALSO:
C.L. 74000 The Modern Period: “The Films of Eric Rohmer,” Professor André Aciman, Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits
This seminar examines how the films of Eric Rohmer, while reflecting Rohmer’s long association with Les Cahiers du cinéma and the innovations of the Nouvelle vague, are equally at home in the literary tradition of the roman d’analyse, as the psychological novel—which dates back to the middle of the Seventeenth Century—is known in France.
Rohmer’s films present the case for a wider, more integrated understanding of artistic forms that do not necessarily reflect mainstream 20th-century intellectual and aesthetic currents.
Readings will include Plautus, Shakespeare, Pascal, Marivaux, and Kleist, as well as writings by Rohmer himself, his contemporaries, and his critics.
Films to be screened and analyzed include: My Night at Maude’s, Claire’s Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Full Moon in Paris, A Winter’s Tale, An Autumn Tale, and others.