Fall 2009

Course Descriptions

Theatre Research (Professor Judith Milhous): This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one begins to join the conversation it represents. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad a range of geographical and historical material. Factors that affect grades include: demonstration that the assigned readings have been done, via informed participation in class discussion and on an in-class exam, written on the scheduled exam date exam; weekly written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final term paper. A basic text will be Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, third edition, which you may already know, but which we can all benefit from re-reading.
Thursdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00pm.

Theatre and Society:  Contemporary Latin-American Theatre and Performance (1960s to present) (Professor Jean Graham-Jones): This course takes a "geochronological" approach to studying Latin American theatre and performance of the last fifty years. Particular attention will be paid to the principal trends and movements of late-twentieth-century Latin American theatre and the cultural terms in play during each decade. We will study how Latin American theatre practitioners' have adopted, adapted, critiqued, and rejected "foreign" traditions as well as created specifically "Latin American" theoretical and aesthetic models. Among the playwrights, performers, and groups likely to be discussed in the course are: Griselda Gambaro, Osvaldo Dragún, Eduardo Pavlovsky, Ricardo Monti, Roberto Mario Cossa, Diana Raznovich, Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Teatro Abierto [Open Theatre], and Teatroxlaidentidad [Theatreforidentity] (Argentina); Augusto Boal, Antunes Filho, Zeno Wilde, and Denise Stoklos (Brazil); Jorge Díaz, Egon Wolff, Isidora Aguirre, Diamela Eltit, Marco Antonio de la Parra, Juan Radrigán, the Gran Circo Teatro de Chile, and Benjamín Galemiri (Chile); Enrique Buenaventura, Teatro Experimental de Cali, La Candelaria, and Mapa Teatro (Colombia); Teatro Escambray, José Triana, and Tania Bruguera (Cuba); Rosario Castellanos, Maruxa Vilalta, Emilio Carballido, Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, and Sabina Berman (Mexico); Alan Bolt, Teyocoyani, and Nixtayolero (Nicaragua); Yuyachkani (Peru); and Myrna Casas and Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico).
Wednesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Studies in the Current Season (Professor Marvin Carlson): This course will be built around class visits to five or six current New York productions during the term. Around each production will be gathered a set of historical and theoretical readings to contextualize and discuss that production. The selection of productions will attempt to cover as wide a range as possible of theatrical approaches, including plays representative of different traditions, historical periods, and dramatic types. Before the beginning of classes in the Fall the first two or three productions will have been chosen, but others will probably not be selected until later in the season, to take advantage of later announcements. Every effort will be made to procure reduced or student seating prices, but students should be prepared to spend up to $200. for theatre admissions. No textbooks, however, will be required.
Thursdays, 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Seminar in Theatre Theory and Criticism:  European Avant-Garde Between World Wars:  1918-1939 (Professor Daniel Gerould):  A study of the theory and practice of the avant-garde during a period of revolution, political upheaval, and social change, following a catastrophic war that led to the collapse of old regimes and the rise of new totalitarian systems on both the right and the left and resulting in an even more destructive world conflict. Special attention will be given to the concept of the avant-garde and its origins as well as to the development of experimental dramatic forms--Futurist, Expressionist, Constructivist, Dadaist, and Surrealist--and activist and participatory events, such as mass-spectacle and agit-prop. Adopting interdisciplinary perspectives, the seminar will focus on collaborative endeavors among dramatists, painters, musicians, directors, and designers; complex interrelations between art and politics; and the impact of technology and scientific discoveries, seen as progressive or apocalyptic; art and literature of the interwar years offer prophetic visions of the future, both utopian and dystopian. The period was especially rich in the formulation of manifestos and doctrinal statements, and theoretical works by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Oskar Schlemmer, Pär Lagerkvist, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Daniil Kharms will be studied. Plays to be read include Bulgakov: Flight and Crimson Island; Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe, The Bedbug, and The Bathhouse; Lev Lunts, The Apes Are Coming; Čapek, R.U.R.; Brecht’s Lehrestücke: The Baden-Baden Learning Play and The Measures Taken; Horváth, Tales from the Vienna Woods; Witkiewicz, The Anonymous Work and Gyubal Wahazar; Jasieński, The Mannequin’s Ball; Salacrou’s The World Is Round. The contributions of women playwrights will be featured in our reading of Felicja Kruszewska, A Dream, Berta Lask, Liberation, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Happy End, and Stanisława Przybyszewska, The Danton Case. The growth of cinema and its importance for the interwar avant-garde will be examined in Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis. In addition to occasional short reports, the major requirement of the seminar is a long research paper due toward the end of the semester.
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

Seminar in Theatre: Theatre and Popular Culture (Professor David Savran): For most of their history, theatrical entertainments have been closely associated with “the people,” whether one defines that collective as the working-class, urban proletariat, or even the white-collared middle class.  From Roman comedy to minstrelsy and burlesque, theatre has often been considered a popular cultural practice.  Although the binary opposition between highbrow and lowbrow was consolidated in the US by the end of the nineteenth century, the most crucial changes in the field of theatrical practice took place in the 1920s, when a literary theatre (led by Eugene O’Neill) decisively separated itself from cinema and popular theatre forms like vaudeville and musical comedy.  This course studies the long and problematic relationship between theatre and “the people” since the middle of the nineteenth century with an emphasis on blackface minstrelsy and the many descendents of and reactions against this genre.  In addition to minstrelsy, the course will study melodrama (The Octoroon), and musical comedy (Shuffle Along, Show Boat, Finian’s Rainbow, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk), as well as the careers of entertainers like Bert Williams and Sammy Davis, Jr.  The course will also examine the European reception of jazz, its influence on the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the European success of African American entertainers like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.  The assignments will include foundational texts for the analysis of popular culture (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu), plays, DVDs about minstrelsy and vaudeville, and histories of non-literary theatrical forms. 
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

History of American Theatre:  Political Theatre and Activism in Post World War II US (Professor James Wilson): One may rightly argue that all theatre constitutes a political act. This seminar, however, will focus on the efficacy of overtly activist and protest theatre on stage and in the streets in the United States since 1945. Although we will examine performances and plays within their historical contexts, we will also consider the role of theatre as a tool for social change in the ongoing struggle for racial equality, sexual liberation, workers’ rights, and international pacifism. Therefore, the course has two main objectives: First, we will try to articulate, using a theoretical and dramaturgical framework, what constitutes political and activist theatre. What aesthetic and community-building strategies do artists and activists employ to facilitate social engagement? How can the performances of the stage actor and the social actor inspire collective action? The second objective is to examine the texts and performances within the institutional and socio-political context in which they were created and/or produced. How does the performance space or environment affect the form and function of the work? What role does the audience play in the attainment of the political goals? In order to work toward these main objectives and to address some of the questions, we will discuss a range of plays, performances, and theatre scholarship. A sampling of the playwrights, performers, and activist groups will include, but is in no way limited to, Arthur Miller, the Living Theatre, Amiri Baraka, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, ACT-UP, Maria Irene Fornes, Castillo Theatre, and Tony Kushner. Course requirements include a presentation, two short written responses, and an original 15-20 page research paper (which will be preceded by a prospectus, annotated bibliography, and an optional first draft). Students will share their research in a mock academic conference.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Seminar in Film Studies: aesthetics of Film (Professor Cynthia Chris): This course introduces students to the art of cinema, through examination of the qualities, history, and analysis of cinematic form. Approaching aspects of film aesthetics in a variety of genres and forms (for example, melodrama, film noir, the Western, and the musical, as well as documentary, animated, and experimental films), the course will provide students with opportunities to master the fundamental vocabulary of film analysis, including mise-en-scène, shot composition, montage, continuity editing, and camera movement, and other concepts. The course will consider relationships among the aesthetics of film, television, and new digital and interactive media, as well as aesthetic adaptations to changing technologies and industrial formations, from the Kinetoscope to the nickelodeon to the movie palace and multiplex; and from theater to television screens, home theaters, and small format mobile devices. Interrogating relationships between sound and image, style and meaning, production and reception, we will seek to understand the sensory and narrative pleasures of film art: aesthetics is, after all, the philosophy of beauty. Required Text: Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Excerpts from: Film as Art by Rudolf Arnheim, What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin, Film Form and/or Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema by Christian Metz, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern by Anne Friedberg, Silent Cinema and/or The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image by Laura Mulvey, The Skin of the Film by Laura U. Marks, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded by Wanda Strauven (editor), Film Sound by Rick Altman, Visible Fictions by John Ellis, “Video: The Distinct Features of the Medium” by David Antin, Beyond the Multiplex by Barbara Klinger, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. Screenings (full-length films and clips): Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (both Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895), Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery (both Edwin S. Porter, 1903), Where Are My Children? (Lois Weber, 1916), Salomé (Charles Bryant, 1923), Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), M (Fritz Lang, 1931), Bambi (David Hand, 1942), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Marty (Delbert Mann, television and film versions, 1953/1955) Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967), Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986), Blue (Derek Jarman, 1989), Chunking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994), The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), Run Lola Run (Tom Twyker, 1999), Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
Assignments: Students will produce weekly “response papers” to readings; participate in class discussions of the readings and screenings; take turns leading discussions on assigned texts; propose a research paper topic in a short essay; and write a final research paper (approximately 15 pages) on some aspect of film aesthetics that demonstrates their capacity to apply course concepts to an original analysis of a film of their own choosing. Enrollment is limited. No permits, non-matrics, auditors.
Mondays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm

Seminar in Film Studies:  Film History I (Professor Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong): 1930 seems to be a meaningful date separating early silent cinema from synchronized sound films. The decades preceding witnessed important social and political changes that included fin-de-siècle developments, the Progressive era, World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras in Japan. Cinema, the first electric mass medium, was born and forged under these exciting periods of monumental changes. Hence we can understand it best as part and parcel of the modernist movement both in art, culture and society.This course will examine cinema not only as texts, but also as social practices. The class explores cinema of the US and Hollywood amid the variety of international cinemas, from France, Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan, as well as the globalization of cinema at this early stage. Topics will include pre-cinema, emergence of cinema, cinema of attraction, development of narrative cinema, changing social meanings of cinema, industrialization of cinema, national cinemas, exhibition and reception of cinema of the period. The course will also investigate the practices and methods of the cinematic historiography. Students will write a 15+ page seminar paper on a research topic of their choosing that has been approved by the professor and will conduct a smaller-scale historical research project making use of archival resources. In addition, students need to contribute weekly to online discussion on Blackboard.
Mondays, 11:45am to 3:45pm

Seminar in Film Studies:  Film and American Culture in the 1930s (Professor Morris Dickstein): This course will focus on the role of film, writing, the visual arts, music, and popular culture during a period of social and economic upheaval: America in the 1930s. It will explore some of the leading film genres of the period, including gangster movies, backstage musicals, dance films, monster movies, screwball comedies, and dramas or documentaries about the social and economic conditions of the Depression itself, from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to The Grapes of Wrath. Each week, films viewed at home or on reserve in the library will be juxtaposed with film shown in class, sometimes in unlikely combinations. Special attention will be paid to the work of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, to the role of comedy in a period of social crisis, to the evolution of major studio styles, the economic situation of the industry itself, and the role of other socially meaningful art forms during the Depression, including drama, the novel, documentary photography, music, and mural painting. Readings will include some works of fiction, journalism, and social history, as well as selections from film histories such as Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money, Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, Elizabeth Kendall, The Runaway Bride, Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames, and Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System. Assigned writing from the period itself will include novels by John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and Budd Schulberg, along with plays by Clifford Odets. Students will be expected to deliver an oral report and produce a 15-page term paper.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm to 5:00pm

Seminar in Film Studies: Alfred Hitchcock and His Legacy (Professor Robert Kapsis): This course examines Alfred Hitchcock’s career as well as his legacy, with special concern for how his influence is reflected in the contemporary thriller genre. In the first part, we will examine Alfred Hitchcock's motion pictures as well as his popular television series in relation to the network of influences which combined to produce them, including Hitchcock's personal eccentricities, the contexts of the thriller genre, the film industry, the film art world, and the wider society. In the second part, we will explore how Hitchcock's work has influenced the careers of important American directors, especially Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, and Steven Spielberg. The centerpiece of this course is an updated version of Multimedia Hitchcock (MH) ---a dynamic interactive computer program I originally developed for the Museum of Modern Art, as part of their celebration of the Hitchcock Centennial in 1999. MH consists of six principal chapters: Biographical Profile; Classic Hitchcock Sequences; Marketing Hitchcock; The Dynamics of Film Collaboration; Critics’ Voices; and The Legacy. These multimedia essays are complemented by Hitchcock on Hitchcock, a textual and audio-video database of the director’s own written and spoken remarks on his films, and a comprehensive Filmography, linked to an electronic Archive of reviews, commentaries, multimedia clips and other Hitchcock-related materials. Each student enrolled in the seminar will receive a DVD/ROM disc copy of the program.Students will prepare several short essays based on the readings and assignments from MH, present in class a close analysis of a classic Hitchcock sequence, and complete a critical essay (10-15 pages) on a film director, American or foreign, whose work has been heavily influenced by Hitchcock.
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to8:15pm

Seminar in Film Studies:  Antonioni & Fellini:  The Challenges of Italian (Post) Modernist Cinema (Professor Giancarlo Lombardi): This course will juxtapose the rich and complex film production of two Italian auteurs, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. While Fellini and Antonioni’s films differ in style, narrative preference, and political orientation, they evidence a common self-reflexive concern for the relationship of cinematic images, sounds, and stories. Neorealism will serve as a starting point for an analysis of Fellini’s postmodern negotiation of autobiographical surrealism as well as Antonioni’s peculiar reframing of cinematic modernism. This course will analyze Antonioni and Fellini’s most important films, placing their work in (film) historical contexts, and theorizing their interest in the aesthetics of cinematic representation and the politics of storytelling. Students will be asked to watch 2 movies a week, one in class and one at home, so that by the end of the course they will be familiar with the majority of these filmmakers’ work. Films to be screened include: Story of a Love Affair (Antonioni, 1950), The Vanquished (Antonioni, 1953), Love in the City (Antonioni/Fellini, 1953), Le Amiche (Antonioni, 1955), Il Grido (Antonioni, 1957), L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960), La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), L’Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962), Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964), Blowup (Antonioni, 1966), Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970), The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975), Beyond the Clouds (Antonioni, 1995), Eros (Antonioni, 2004), The White Sheik (Fellini, 1952), I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953), La Strada (Fellini, 1954), Il Bidone (Fellini, 1955), Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957), La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960), 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini, 1965), Satyricon (Fellini, 1969), Roma (Fellini, 1972), Amarcord (Fellini, 1973), Orchestra Rehearsal (Fellini, 1978), And the Ship Sails On (Fellini, 1983), Ginger and Fred (Fellini, 1986). The course will be conducted in English and all films will be screened with English subtitles.
Tuesdays, 6:30pm to 10:00pm

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