The Certificate Program in Film Studies is open only to students already
enrolled in Ph.D. programs at The Graduate School. Candidates for the Certifcate
must take a total of 15 credits (five courses) in Film Studies including a required
three-course "core" offered through the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and two additional
electives offered under the auspices of any participating Ph.D. Program or the
Certificate Program itself. Many courses are simultaneously cross-listed in several
doctoral and interdisciplinary programs to facilitate student enrollment.
THE REQUIRED CORE
1. Theatre U714:"Aesthetics of the Film"
This course introduces students to graduate-level film analysis by aquainting them with basic film techniques,
strategies, and styles. Central topics to be studied include narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scčne,
composition, camera movement, editing, sound and music, genre, and spectatorship. In addition, students will
become familiar with a variety of critical perspectives on film as well as the essential bibliographical
sources and fundamentals of research in the field.
2. Theatre U715:"History of the Cinema I, 1895-1930" or
Theatre U716:"History of the Cinema II,1930 to the Present"
Each one-semester course is devoted to intensive analysis of the development of the cinema as a medium and art form
throughout the world during the period covered. Many key films representing various technological or artistic innovations
are screened and discussed. 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 as well as other art forms
will be central topics of discussion. Different strategies and theories of historiographic research will be extensively analyzed.
3. Theatre U816:"Seminar in Film Theory: Theories of the Cinema"
This course presents an overview of "classical" and contemporary film theory.
The contributions of the most important early theoreticians such as Eisenstein,
Bazin, Epstein, Arnheim, Dulac, Merleau-Ponty, Balázs, and Kracauer, as well as
such contemporary theorists as Metz, Mitry, Baudry, Mulvey, and Heath will be
reviewed and contextualized. Questions about the structure and functioning of the
filmic text, the nature of cinematic representation, and film spectatorship raised
by the various scholls of thought, including phenomenology, Marxism, semiology,
psychoanalysis, and feminism, will be of major concern. Attention will focus on the
analysis of primary theoretical texts, although secondary texts as well as historical
works and films that assist in contextualizing film theory may be assigned as well.
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