FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS
SPRING SEMESTER 2000 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Theatre 71500 History of Cinema I: 1895-1930 GC, Monday, 6:30-9:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Joyce Rheuban {cross-listed with ART 79500 & MALS 77200}
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)
Theatre 81600 Seminar in Film Theory: Theories of the Cinema GC, Thursday, 4:15-6:15pm 3 credits, Prof. Tony Pipolo {cross- listed with ART 89500}
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. Requirements include class presentations and a final paper. Enrollment is limited to 12.
Theatre 81500 African Eyes: Studies in Film Form and Narrative GC, Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Peter Hitchcock
Although films have been made in Africa since the 1920s, it is only since the great independence movements in the middle of the century that significant African cinemas began to emerge in their own right.
In part, African cinema aesthetics developed through specific political dimensions precipitate in the socio-economic conditions of decolonization and nationalist expression. African cinema's further provocation unfolds in the ways in which it has built on traditional narrative story-telling forms (not just oral tales in general, but unique genres, like those of the griot). Whether or not such genres can be visualized remains the challenge in much of African cinema, but more than this, there are sustained and critical pressures at work that greatly inhibit independent and indigenous film making of all kinds.
What are the aesthetic priorities of African cinema? How are these compromised or reoriented by the realities of national and international limits on production, distribution, and exhibition? Do "African eyes" guarantee perspicacity or is such vision distorted by the continually racist and ethnicist assumptions of the international public sphere? What are the ironies of auteurism on the continent?
Rather than being only a basic introduction to the main trajectories of African film making, this course will focus on particular examples of African cinema that demonstrate both the interventions and the contradictions of its art in recent years.
The class will investigate to what extent an African visual style is possible as a distinctive aesthetic (particularly given the vastly different cultural histories of the continent) along with the necessity to "Africanize" and transform cultural codes associated with Western technology and expansion. Profoundly dialogic, African cinema tends to project an answerability (responsibility) according to a complex set of micro and macrological contexts. Thus, although much of our work will concentrate on West African cinema, we will see that this responsibility in cinema can be more broadly construed.
Films will include: Wend Kuuni (Kabore, 1982), Hyenas (Mambety, 1992), Guimba (Sissoko, 1995), Sarrounia (Hondo, 1986), Ceddo (Sembene), Yeelen (Cisse, 1987), Tilai (Oeudraogo, 1990), Keita (Kouyate, 1995), and Monday's Girls (Onwurah, 1993). Readings will be drawn from Ukadike (1994), Diawara (1995), Bakari, and Cham (1996), and Malkmus and Armes (1991), plus selected essays on postcoloniality, "third cinema," and the international film industry. I also hope to get a couple of directors to make a class visit (Diawara, Bekolo, etc.).
Theatre 81500 Animation as Art and Cultural Form GC, Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Heather Hendershot [Cross-listed with Art 89500]
Historically, the study of animation has played second fiddle to the study of live-action films. In part this is due, no doubt, to the status of the theatrical cartoon as part of a larger film bill. Animation is thus dismissed as "just cartoons," and non-theatrical, more serious animated work rarely finds its way into the classroom. This class, conversely, presumes that animation is an important artistic and cultural form.
The first third of the course focuses on animation techniques. Next, we will study animators and artists such as the independent filmmakers Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Vikking Eggeling, Jan Svankmajer, Caroline Leaf, Norman McLaren and others, and will address the wider industrial context that independents work within. We will turn to the work of Fleischer and Disney, who vied throughout the 30's and 40's to dominate American animation both financially and artistically. The final third of the course turns to animation as a cultural form, examining animated films as tools for nationalism, instruction, and propaganda. We will learn how animated films of the 30-50's exhibit racism and sexism that would be censored from live-action films, and we will look at how later films play with and against earlier stereotyping.
Students are required to attend class regularly, arrive on time, do the reading, and contribute to discussion. There will be a single major assignment in three stages: a 2-3 page proposal and bibliography for a final project; a 10-15 page draft; and a final draft of 15-20 pages. (Complete description/syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109)
Sociology 81500 ST: City & Film: The Transformation of Rural & Urban Society GC, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30 pm, 3 credits, Profs. William Kornblum and Leonard Quart
A course analyzing a set of documentary and fictional realist films about the nature of social change in urban and rural societies. The emphasis will be on American films, but we will also examine a number of outstanding Third World and European works.
We will study the films for their directorial strategies and narrative forms, as well as their social and cultural meanings. Some of the films we will discuss include Stoney's All My Babies, Vidor's Our Daily Bread, Young and Roemer's Nothing But A Man, Lee's Clockers, Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, Ray's Pather Panchali, Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird, and Sembene's Borom Sarret. Readings keyed to class sessions will develop sociological and anthropological views of the rural to urban change. Each of the films, however, will be analyzed as an individual work of cinematic art, responding to and informing its historic moment.