FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
SPRING 1999 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Eng. U862 - Warhol GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. GB4034, 4 credits, Prof. Koestenbaum [36135]. {Cross-listed with Art U895.02 Seminar: Selected Topics in the History of the Motion Picture: Warhol [36171]}Intensive study of the work of Andy Warhol, with an emphasis on his writings and his early films. We will explore his effect on the evolution of queer culture; the questions of agency, authority, and collaboration that arise from his methods; his ironic reproductions and repudiations of Hollywood, the star system, and cinematic history; the limits and possibilities of conceptual art, performance art, Pop art, camp, and fashion; his relation to the avant-garde; his promulgation and erosion of such roles as fine artist, dandy, flaneur, homosexual, and genius. Though focused on Warhol, the seminar is also inevitably concerned, more generally, with the 1960's, Pop art, underground cinema, and queer cultural production.
Texts will include all the written (or spoken) works of Andy Warhol: a: a novel, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Popism, and The Andy Warhol Diaries. Secondary works may include Stephen Koch's Stargazer, David Bourdon's Warhol, the journals of Candy Darling, and Reva Wolf's Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s. Films to be screened will include Blow Job, Harlot, Kiss, Loves of Ondine, My Hustler, Haircut, and Vinyl. Students will be encouraged to use the Museum of Modern Art's Film Study Center, which has study prints of most of Warhol's films.
Requirement: one oral presentation and one essay (20-25 pages) on any aspect of Warhol's work.
Theatre U716 - History of Cinema II: 1930 to the Present GC: Th, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. 1223, 3 credits, Prof. Custen [29766]. {Cross-listed with Art U795 - History of the Motion Picture: Film History II [36158]}
This course will examine the full flowering of the modern Holywood studio system, its mode of production, and its role as a manufacturer of culture. These issues (and others) will be discussed within a comparative context in which the dominant practices of the American film industry are contrasted to developments outside the United States as seen both in "national" cinemas and within cinemas of resistance and opposition.
This course is a multi-methodological assessment of how the foundation and evolution of a particular praxis -- the studio system of film production -- created a particular "culture of Hollywood" which, in turn, enabled film corporations to become more than manufacturers: they became cultural impresarios who shaped consciousness.
Issues to be examined: how the "Taylorization" of moviemaking shaped the possibilities of narrative; the levels of and functions played by authorship in Hollywood and outside the American film industry; levels of censorship in the American cinema; film and its relation to other cultural intertexts; the different levels of constraint on filmmaking; constructing oppositional film practices within the contexts of production and reception; the roles of stars and genres in regulating the shape of film content; film's function as an arena for contesting and shaping public culture.
Theatre U815 - Seminar in Film Studies: Weimar Cinema GC: T, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rheuban [29768]. {Cross-listed with Art U895.01- Seminar: Selected Topics in the History of the Motion Picture: Weimar Cinema [29939] & German U830 - German Literature in Relation to Other Arts: Weimar Cinema [36109]}
An important aspect of German society and culture of the interwar period, Weimar cinema has been scrutinized as evidence in the attempt to comprehend the rise of National Socialism and its aftermath. Traditional film history has regarded Weimar cinema as an authors' cinema and a cinema of unparalleled technical and technological expertise. Recent scholarship has expanded the field to include reception, the place of the female spectator, a re-reading of Siegfried Kracauer's history of Weimar cinema as social history, and the mass culture/art cinema debate. This course is concerned with such recent issues, as well as the vital artistic and commercial intercourse between Hollywood and Berlin. Weekly screenings include fantastic films in the expressionist style, "street films," proletarian films, and films of other genres. Readings include pertinent critical and historiographical studies by Kracauer, Thomas Elsaesser, Patrice Petro, among others.
Theatre U815.01 Seminar in Film Studies: Transnational Cinemas GC: M, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hitchcock [36066]
The case for transnational cinemas is easily stated: if it is true that the global integration of media image markets has rapidly intensified in the last twenty years then we should scarcely be surprised by the emergence of transnational cinemas that produce and are produced by the structural logics of globalization in general. But no sooner has one admitted the truism of a certain synergy between macro-and micrological socio-cultural phenomena than one faces some major theoretical (and political) difficulties in cinema studies. For instance, on the one hand transnationalism can be read as redolent with that expansionism ("Hollywoodization") formerly characterized as cultural imperialism (in the vein of How to Read Donald Duck); on the other, transnationalism is shot through with counter-hegemonic tendencies produced by diasporic, migrant, and displaced communities in the wake of imperialism and colonialism. Two further critical components would seem to deconstruct this binary: historically cinema has always seemed an index of border crossing, yet over this sits the allure of the Nation State as that which gives the cinema and cinema studies their logical base despite its by now infamous porous boundaries. Indeed, the theory and practice of transnational cinemas now represent a constitutive aporia within contemporary heady narratives of globalization. They ask a very basic question: can one identify the transnational in cinema or does such an identity itself represent an unimaginable or chimerical world for cinema as culture and as an institution?
This course will explore in detail the cultural, economic, and theoretical difficulties of transnational cinema as it is currently lived. In addition to trenchant critiques of the global (Wallerstein, King) and of nation (Bhabha, et. al, Anderson) we will focus on two in-depth case studies: transnational Chinese cinema and North African or Beur cinema. Both will test conventional approaches to Hollywood transnationalism. Films will include Red Sorghum, Farewell My Concubine, Eat Drink Man Woman, Rai, Tea in the Harem, Cafe‚ au Lait, and Hate. Broken Arrow, Rumble in the Bronx, and Sense and Sensibility will also animate discussion.