FSCP 81000/THEA 81500/ASCP 81500 – African American Film, Professor Paula Massood, Wednesday, 6:30-10:00pm, Room C-419, 3 credits

This course is an introduction to African American filmmaking from the early 20th century to the present.

We will start with effects and the "after" effects of early films, such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and the responses to the film by a selection of African American filmmakers over time.

Throughout the semester, we will discuss the ways in which African American directors and other film personnel have addressed issues of representation, caricature, and stereotype through a variety of filmmaking styles and stories.

We will examine the attempts by different directors and film theorists to define the parameters—or even the possibility—of a black film aesthetic or aesthetics and discuss the different forms these attempts have taken over time.

Screenings throughout the semester will include a cross-section of films made between 1900 to the present and will be comprised of films made by African American filmmakers or other relevant films featuring black life and characters.

By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with the following: Oscar Micheaux, race film production, the L.A. School of Filmmakers, blaxploitation, "hood" films, and a variety of contemporary independent filmmakers.

Students will be able to analyze and discuss African American film and American film in the context of a number of theoretical and aesthetic questions, including: "What is black film?," "What is a black film aesthetic?," Where does black film fit in Hollywood?," and "What have been the local and global effects of black filmmaking?"

Required Texts: Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993.Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia:Temple Univ. Press, 2003. Valerie Smith, Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. (Smith). Manthia Diawara, ed. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. (Diawara) Supplemental readings available on reserve. (SUP)

Course Requirements: Writing Assignments: 8–10pp. midterm essay on prearranged topic; 10–15pp. final essay on topic of choice. Discussion Questions: Each week, a student will be assigned to prepare and present two questions to initiate class discussion on the scheduled reading and screening.

Participation/Attendance: Participation in class discussion and class attendance are basic requirements for the course (attendance is mandatory). Syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109)

FSCP81000/THEA81500--The Cyborg & Technologies of Imagination, Professor Peter Hitchcock, Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm, Room C-419, 3credits

Science fiction film and literature have conventionally explored the theme of what makes a human human. The cyborg builds and bends such conventions by denoting that contestable terrain between the human subject and technoscience.

Much cyborg culture wants to present this space as liminal and liberating--as a fantasy that is indeed simply representable. Yet when that assumption is made the outcome is either deeply conservative or conventional in the negative sense.

Rather than explore cyborgian space as a simple opposition between humanism and techno-superhumanism or posthumanism, this course will examine key films (and several examples of literature and theory) in order to engage critically the mode of narrativity that cyborg films conjure.

The cyborg is the tale told by technology about progress and human self consciousness that instead gave us the twentieth century. Now that the brave new world of the twenty-first century is upon us it is time to take stock of the science fiction realities of the ‘borg and body.

The cyborg is a complex integer of how identities are made and made up and therefore it shares something of the technology of film narrative itself (the cyborg identity is always a "special" effect). And wherever identity is at stake, in the clean chrome interface of flesh and technology, there lies politics (of gender, class, transnational space and the future of [the] race).

What are the components of cyborg narrativity? Is it an allegory of our nervous and/or world system? Has Hal won afer all, or just CGI?

The course will begin with several definitions of the cyborg which we will consider alongside significant early representations (Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lang’s Metropolis, and a few salient clips from Bride of Frankenstein).

Next, we will analyze the components of early Cold War Cyborgania (Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and its relationship to the cyborg of the nuclear apocalypse (Terminator and its myriad "progenies").

The third topic, the cyborg and capital, could easily be a course in itself, but we will restrict ourselves to the alien and alienation in the Alien series and the trenchant dystopia of muties and replicants in Blade Runner--the touchstone of the cyborganic intellectual--(and its contrast with Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Gibson’s Neuromancer).

These readings will connect to the no less important problem of engendering the cyborg--a space, in particular, where feminist theory and fiction have been a good deal more radical than most high-profile film narratives (alongside the plethora of significant criticism in this area--Haraway, Balsamo, Wolmark, etc.--we will read at least one feminist sci-fi novel, Russ’s The Female Man or Piercy’s He, She, and It for instance).

A fifth case study on cyborg narrativity will feature memory and the fate of history (the memory chip/clip as the memorial to the death of Time in Total Recall, but also the time/space reversals of cyborgania in Twelve Monkeys or The Matrix).

We will then consider whether AI stands for artificial imagination and whether this sense of artifice might ground rather than universalize cinema in the digital age–an exploration that will propel us into anime and transnationalism

FSCP 81000/Theatre 81600/Art 89400 Seminar in Film Theory Professor William Boddy, Monday, 4:15-6:30pm, Room C-419, 3 credits

This course explores some of the major texts and controversies within classical and contemporary film theory as well as a number of related theoretical issues from related fields. Our attention will focus on the analysis of primary theoretical texts, although films and secondary writings which assist in contextualizing film theory will also be examined.

This course requires no previous experience in film studies, and students from a variety of academic backgrounds are welcome.

Primary texts: Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings Sixth Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); selections from Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Film and Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds., A Companion to Film Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999); Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., Film Studies Critical Approaches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Additional photocopied material will be placed on reserve at the Graduate Center library.

Screenings: Brief excerpts from the following films will be screened in class: The Last Machine: Space and Time Machine (BBC, 1994); Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915); Henry V (Olivier, 1942), The Metric Films (Kubelka, 1956-60); Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925); Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1928); Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956); Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954); Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard, 1966); Bontoc Eulogy (Fuentes, 1995); The Crowd (Vidor, 1928); A Face in the Crowd (Kazin, 1957); Network (Lumet, 1976); Tongues Untied (Riggs, 1991); Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Rappaport, 1992); Jollies (Benning, 1990)

Course Requirements: In addition to participation in seminar discussions (representing 10% of the final grade), each student is responsible for presenting selected readings to the class (10%), producing six weekly journal entries in response to course readings and screenings (20%), writing a 15-page research paper on a topic selected in consultation with the instructor (50%), and preparing an in-class presentation of the research project to the seminar (10%).

FSCP 81000/C L 85000 Time & Modernity: The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni & Wong Kar Wai, Professor Jerry Carlson, Wednesday, 6:30-8:30pm, Room TBA, 3 credits

The traditions of Classical Hollywood cinema portray time as above all linear, understandable, shaped by deadlines, and capable of strong closure. To be sure, this is one way time can be experienced.

But it is not the only way. Since the Industrial Revolution artists have been interested – indeed, some would say, obsessed – with new notions of time and their ways of intersecting, combining, connecting, or conflicting.

This course will explore the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar-wai, two filmmakers who make the workings of time one of their central concerns. Both come from societies – Italy and Hong Kong, respectively – that have undergone rapid, massive urban and industrial development in the past fifty years. Their films explore the crises in individual lives created by changes that may seem to have obvious economic or social benefits.

Both directors explore new narrative forms to find the relations among historical, sacred, public, private, and intimate forms of temporal experience. The course will be organized by close readings of their films.

In addition, the course will situate their works within the historical, political, cultural, and artistic contexts in which they are created.

Readings will include some theorists of time (for example, Bergson and Proust) as well as prose fiction (for example, by Cortazar, Murakami, Pavese and Puig) that has influenced the directors.