FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
SPRING 2002 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
THEATRE 71500/ART 79500/MALS 77200 - History of Cinema I: 1895-1930, Professor Joyce Rheuban, Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419. 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."
(Complete description/syllabus will be available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109)
Information: Joyce Rheuban
THEATRE 81500-- Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow: Oscar Micheaux and His Circle in U.S. Cinema, Professor Michele Wallace, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C-419. 3 credits
This course will draw upon the recently rediscovered films of, and the newly published scholarship on the black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We will examine his writings and his career within the context of contemporary race imagery of race and its characteristic social manifestations (passing, lynching and Jim Crow segregation).
Primarily, we will employ comparisons of his films with such films as Uncle Tom's Cabin (Edwin Porter's in 1903 and William Robert Daly's in 1914), D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Dudley Murphy's musical shorts, King Vidor's Hallelujah! (1929), Imitation of Life (John Stahl's in 1934 and Douglas Sirk's in 1959), Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), Harve Foster's and William Jackson's Song of the South (1946), Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949), Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1956), and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
List of films to be screened and required texts available in Certificate Programs Office.
Information: Michele Wallace
Theatre 81500 - Cultural Theory and the Documentary Film, Professor Alison Griffiths, Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm, Room C419. 3 credits
This is a lecture course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory. 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.
The course offers students a broad introduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, social class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism.
Films screened in class will encompass the following genres: silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, auteurist documentary, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and mainstream documentary. The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spheres and evoke discourses of "truth," "realism," and "authenticity" through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings.
List of required texts available in the Certificate Programs Office.
Information: Alison Griffiths
Theatre 81600/Art 89500 - Seminar in Film Theory, Professor William Boddy, Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room C419.3 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.
Information: William Boddy