FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
SPRING 2001 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Theatre 71500 - History of the Cinema I: 1895-1930. GC, M, 6:30-9:30pm., Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor George F. Custen {Cross-Listed with ART 79500 and MALS 77200}
The course is devoted to the analysis of the development of the cinema largely through the rise of Hollywood, though other national cinemas throughout the world will also be covered.
The growth of the international film industry, above all of Hollywood, the emergence of representational codes, popular genres, and cinematic canons, and the cinema's impact on society will be central topics of discussion.
We will also look at the struggles various groups waged to control and define the cinema, as well as investigate the influential role played in its development by other art forms.
In addition, different strategies and theories of historiographic research will be analyzed.
Theatre 81600 - Seminar in Film Theory. GC, Thurs., 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor Ella Shohat {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.
Theatre 81500 -- Avant Garde Film and Video. GC, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30 p.m. Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor William Boddy {Cross-Listed with ART 89500}
This course offers an historical and stylistic surveyof independent film and video making in the postwar United States. After identifying significant precursors and contexts for avant-garde filmmaking in early twentieth century European modernist movements, the course examines several related issues through screenings and close analysis of a variety of film and video texts.
These topics include the relation of avant-garde film and video culture to aesthetic movements in contemporary American painting, literature, and performing arts; the relation of independent film and video making to the institutions of Hollywood and the television industry; the role of emerging electronic technologies in the avant garde; and the contributions to an understanding of avant-garde film by contemporary theoretical work in feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and cultural studies.
This course requires no previous experience in film studies, and students from a variety of academic backgrounds are welcome.
COURSE CANCELLED
Theatre 81500 - 2001, A Space Odyssey: Cyborgs and Cultural Identity. GC, Tuesday, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Peter Hitchcock
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. Rather than explore cyborgian space as a simple opposition between humanism and techno-superhumanism, this course will examine key films (and several examples of literature and theory) not to establish the contours of a genre, but to critically engage the mode of narrativity that cyborg films conjure.
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).