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Fall 2008 Undergraduate Course Atlas
updated 7/15/2008
Cryderman, TT 1:00-2:15, MAX: 18
Mandatory film screening Thurs. 8-10pm
Content: This course teaches students the critical skills involved in the interpretation of films. During the first half of the semester, we will learn the basic techniques of film form and style. For the remainder of the course, we will discuss these techniques as they relate to issues of critical analysis (cultural criticism, genre, ideology) in both Hollywood narrative cinema and non-Hollywood/alternative cinemas.
Texts may include: David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (8th edition) and a selection of reserve readings.
Particulars: Two lectures and one small-group discussion meeting per week. Weekly writing assignments, an in-class mid-term, an 8–10 pp. term paper, and final exam.
Note: Good writing skills are important for success in this course.
This course is required for the Film Studies major and minor.
Bernstein, MW 11:45-12:35, Th discussion sessions, MAX: 100
Mandatory film screening Wed. 6-8pm
Content: This course teaches students the critical skills involved in the interpretation of films. During the first half of the semester, we will learn the basic techniques of film form and style. For the remainder of the course, we will discuss these techniques as they relate to issues of critical analysis (cultural criticism, genre, ideology) in both Hollywood narrative cinema and non-Hollywood/alternative cinemas.
Texts may include: David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (8th edition) and a selection of reserve readings.
Particulars: Two lectures and one small-group discussion meeting per week. Weekly writing assignments, an in-class mid-term, an 8–10 pp. term paper, and final exam.
Note: Good writing skills are important for success in this course.
This course is required for the Film Studies major and minor.
Mueller, TTh 11:30-12:45, Max: 45
Mandatory film screening Wed. 8-10pm
Content: Origins of the Cinema; International Expansion of the Industry, 1907-1918; D. W. Griffith and the Development of Narrative Form; German Cinema of the Weimar Period, 1919-1929; Soviet Silent Cinema and the Theory of Montage, 1917-1931; Hollywood in the Twenties; the Coming of Sound, 1926-1932; the Sound Film and the American Studio System; European Cinema in the Thirties.
Readings: David A. Cook. A History of Narrative Film (4th edition)
Particulars: Exams: 3 hour tests; one final exam; occasional quizzes. Mandatory attendance of evening screening sessions.
Comment: This is the first half of the two-semester sequence Film Studies 371-372. FS371 is a prerequisite for FS372, History of Film 1938-Present. It may be taken without prerequisite, but keen interest in the subject of film is assumed. Freshmen should not be allowed to register for either FS 371 or 372 under any circumstances.
This course is required for the Film Studies major and minor.
Rambuss, TTH 2:30-3:45
same as CPLT 301SWR/ENG 421RSWR
Content: This seminar affords the opportunity for intensive study of Hamlet—an enduringly significant Renaissance cultural artifact, yet also one of Shakespeare’s most difficult, enigmatic plays—on page, stage, and screen. Rather than merely alighting upon the play’s many dramatic highlights, the format of this single-text class will allow us to linger over Hamlet, scene by scene. In conjunction with our close reading of Shakespeare’s play, the seminar will engage a variety of critical approaches—including psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, and queer theory—which we will then ply as interpretive tools for forging different ways of reading Hamlet.
The seminar will also consider three very different cinematic renderings of the play: Laurence Olivier’s 1948 expressionist Hamlet; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 action-hero Hamlet (starring Mel Gibson); and Michael Almereyda’s 1990 technoculture Hamlet (starring Ethan Hawke). And we will glance at the re-citation of Hamlet—its characters, set pieces, adages, and literary and philosophical tropes—in some disparate non-Hamlet movies: Last Action Hero, Clueless, and A Nightmare on Elm St. Our juxtaposition of lowbrow, popular cinematic forms (the action movie, the teen comedy, and the horror film) with the “classic Shakespeare film” will thus set the stage for a consideration of Shakespeare’s cultural status, both in his time and ours, as well as the shifting relations between high culture and popular culture more generally.
Texts: Hamlet; an anthology or two of critical essays.
Particulars: Attendance at all classes; a short paper; a longer seminar paper; a group seminar presentation.
Content: This course provides a hands-on introduction to technical and stylistic foundations of moving image production. Students working singly and collaboratively with a variety of film and video formats will becomes familiar with essentials of preproduction, visual storytelling, composition, imaging, direction and editing. We will also extensively discuss the economic and professional realities of narrative content creation for film, television and new media.
Particulars: Lab fee of $100. Permission of the instructor required prior to registration.
Prerequisites: FILM270, ARTHIST107. Open to Film Studies majors and minors only.
Schreiber, TT 1:00-2:15, MAX: 20
Mandatory screening Tu 6-8pm
Content: This lecture class, the first part of a year-long course in film theory, provides a firm grounding in works on the cinema written prior to 1968. In addition to helping students acquire a foundational knowledge of classical film theory, the other major goal of this course is to train students to write about film in a theoretically informed manner, so please note that this course will be writing intensive.
Texts: TBA
Prerequisite: FILM270.
This course is required for the Film Studies major and minor.
Pratt, TTh 2:30-3:45, Max: 14
Mandatory film screening Mon. 8-10pm
Content: This course explores the evolution of non-fiction cinema from the "actualite's" of the late 19th century to the contemporary obsession with so-called "reality television." We will focus in particular on the ways in which documentary films have worked to shape our perceptions of reality and history, and on the unique practical, aesthetic, and ethical issues which separate non-fiction filmmaking from other forms of cultural production.
Prerequisite: FILM270.
FILM394S: Screening China
Rong Cai,
TTh 1:00-2:15 Max: 2
Mandatory film screenings Mon. 6 p.m.
Content: The course explores the history and development of Chinese cinema since the early twentieth century. It discusses "film in China" and "China in film" by focusing on the function of cinema and the continual reconfigurations of time, space, gender, and history in Chinese films under different historical conditions in the past hundred years.
Texts: TBA
Particulars: Several one-page film response papers; two presentations; and a final paper (8-10 pages) of film analysis and discussion of a representative feature of Chinese cinema (research required). Attendance and active participation will
Faculty
Content: This project course can involve an internship or film production. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Internship is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given. Although the Department of Film Studies occasionally can find internships for students, students are encouraged to arrange projects on their own.
Requirements: Internships require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, a journal, and an eight-page paper. Film production projects require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, the submission of production notes, and a final product.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
Mueller, TT 10:00-11:15, MAX: 9
Mandatory film screening Tu 8-10pm
Content: This course is a seminar workshop to encourage students to develop their facility with analyzing films. We will first examine the work of journalistic and academic critics, and focus particularly on the issues of writing style and readership. Our primary activity will be viewing new releases in the theaters and writing critiques of these films from various perspectives: feminist, ideological, genre, authorship, national cinema, etc. Class members will read and critique each other’s work.
Texts: The National Society of Film Critics, Love and Hisses
Xeroxed articles.
Partculars: This is a writing intensive course that also requires considerable class participation. Students will write ten papers and revise several of them. They will also be asked to give a presentation on a current, practicing film critic. There will be no exams.
Prerequisite: FILM270.
Brown, MW 11:30-12:45,
Max: 18
Mandatory film screening Mon. 5:30-8:00pm
Content: Students will perform assignments with the end goal of achieving professional competency in the craft of screenwriting. Assignments will include treatment, development, narrative outline development, character development, and dialogue writing. Film screenings will augment seminar style discussions. The final paper will either be act one of an original feature film or a 30-page original short film script.
Prerequisite: FILM270.
Milly Monday 2-5 p.m.
Content: This course will introduce the fundamentals of writing for film. We will explore the basic elements of storytelling -- character, plot, setting, structure dialog, etc. -- and how each is used in writing for the screen. Students will learn feature-length format and will evaluate other students' scripts. The course will concentrate on writing the first 30 pages of a feature-length film as well as technical consideration of technique, character development, and dramatic structure. Classes will be conducted as workshops in which the main emphasis is on the students' own work, with much in-class writing and improvisation.
NOTE: Students wishing to take this course as FILM402: Scriptwriting will also need to fill out the Creative Writing Program application (please state on the application you want this as FILM402) and return it to the Creative Writing Program by the deadlines stated at the beginning of the course atlas.
Texts (both sections): Texts to be announced
Particulars: No pre-requisite for students taking this course as ENG 378RWR. Pre-requisite for students taking this course as FILM 402WR: FILM 270, Introduction to Film. Students should budget for photocopying. Students are required to attend weekly film screenings, and on-campus readings and colloquia sponsored by the Creative Writing Program outside of class time.
Schreiber, TT 4:00-5:15, Max: 18
Mandatory film screening Wed.. 8:00-10:00pm
Content: This course will explore some of the key issues that have preoccupied critical theory and popular conversation by and about women in American film and popular culture over the last 70 years. Students will be asked to think critically about the ways in which women have been targeted as readers, viewers and consumers of film and popular culture as well as how women have shaped their own representations in film, music, literature, television, and the internet. The semester will be broken into four sections: In “To See and Be Seen” we will discuss the ways in which women are both the objects and subjects of looking in visual culture from the classical Hollywood cinema to recent reality shows such as America’s Top Model. In the second section, “To Rally and be Rallied” we will talk about the ways in women engage and are engaged in political discourses through different media forms, ranging from avant-garde cinema to blogging. In “To Love and Be Loved,” we will look at the ways in which women are engaged emotionally within film and popular culture forms, either by narratives of romantic love or maternal love. And, finally in “To Hear and Be Heard” we will focus on music as a historical form that has both stifled and empowered the female “voice.”
Texts:
Jones, Amelia, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Kaplan, E. Ann., ed. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Schneir, Miriam, ed. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Women’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. New York: Seal Press, 2007.
Particulars: The course will be discussion-based and writing-intensive. Students are expected to be willing and eager to think critically about issues related to gender and culture, be open to sharing their views with the class, and listen respectfully to the views of others. Requirements will include: weekly writing assignments, a term paper, and a take-home final exam.
Prerequisite: FILM270.
Faculty
Prerequisite: Admission to College Honors Program; consent of the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the Thesis Advisor.
Faculty
Content: A supervised project in an area of study to be determined by instructor and student in the semester preceding the independent study. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Directed Study is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given.
Requirements: Directed readings are arranged with the instructor. Internships require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, a journal, and an eight-page paper.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
Schreiber, TT 4:00-5:15, Max: 18
Mandatory film screening Wed.. 8:00-10:00pm
Content: This course will explore some of the key issues that have preoccupied critical theory and popular conversation by and about women in American film and popular culture over the last 70 years. Students will be asked to think critically about the ways in which women have been targeted as readers, viewers and consumers of film and popular culture as well as how women have shaped their own representations in film, music, literature, television, and the internet. The semester will be broken into four sections: In “To See and Be Seen” we will discuss the ways in which women are both the objects and subjects of looking in visual culture from the classical Hollywood cinema to recent reality shows such as America’s Top Model. In the second section, “To Rally and be Rallied” we will talk about the ways in women engage and are engaged in political discourses through different media forms, ranging from avant-garde cinema to blogging. In “To Love and Be Loved,” we will look at the ways in which women are engaged emotionally within film and popular culture forms, either by narratives of romantic love or maternal love. And, finally in “To Hear and Be Heard” we will focus on music as a historical form that has both stifled and empowered the female “voice.”
Texts:
Jones, Amelia, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Kaplan, E. Ann., ed. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Schneir, Miriam, ed. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Women’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. New York: Seal Press, 2007.
Particulars: The course will be discussion-based and writing-intensive. Students are expected to be willing and eager to think critically about issues related to gender and culture, be open to sharing their views with the class, and listen respectfully to the views of others. Requirements will include: weekly writing assignments, a term paper, and a take-home final exam.
FILM 501: Seminar in Authorship: Fritz Lang
Pratt, M 2:00-5:00, MAX: 15
Mandatory film screening Th 6-9pm
Content:
Fritz Lang’s bifurcated career—over forty years almost equally divided between the film industries of Germany and Hollywood—has long made his films the object of intense partisan debates over the relative position of authorship in the context of not only competing national cinemas and alternative modes of industrial production but within a series of competing forms of alternative cultural criticism. This course will examine the cream of Lang’s oeuvre through the prism of several decades of film criticism extending from contemporary reviews, through Cahiers du Cinema auteurism up through the various “post-auteurist” schools, all of whom have been equally fascinated with “this unblinking eye, this merciless gaze.”
Mueller, TT 10:00-11:15, MAX: 9
Mandatory film screening Tu 8-10pm
Content: This course is a seminar workshop to encourage students to develop their facility with analyzing films. We will first examine the work of journalistic and academic critics, and focus particularly on the issues of writing style and readership. Our primary activity will be viewing new releases in the theaters and writing critiques of these films from various perspectives: feminist, ideological, genre, authorship, national cinema, etc. Class members will read and critique each other’s work.
Texts: The National Society of Film Critics, Love and Hisses
Xeroxed articles.
Partculars: This is a writing intensive course that also requires considerable class participation. Students will write ten papers and revise several of them. They will also be asked to give a presentation on a current, practicing film critic. There will be no exams.
Bernstein, W 2:00-5:00, MAX: 15
Mandatory film screening M 6-8pm
Content: This seminar will take a very close look at the celebrated/notorious classical Hollywood studio system from roughly 1920 through 1975. We will consider the economic basis for the major studios' dominance of the industry, the organization of labor within the studios, the tension between studio self-regulation and external film censorship (including the blacklist), the development of visual styles, house styles, film genres and the manufacture of stars at the different studios, the place of individual artists within the system, and the industry's strategy for coping with technological, economic and competitive challenges to its dominance (e.g., the advent of sound and television, the Great Depression, World War II, etc.) Students will complete the course with a thorough grounding in the outlines and details of this remarkable industry.
Readings may include:
volumes from the Screen Decades series and
Tino Balio, ed. The American Film Industry (2nd edition)
Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939
Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine
Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent
Matthew Bernstein, ed. Controlling Hollywood
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Studio System: Film Style and Mode of Production
David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: America's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931
Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History
Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution
Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928
Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959
Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema
Paul Monaco, The Sixties, 1960-1969
Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System
Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939
Particulars: Students will be asked to write a short mid-term paper and a lengthy (25-30 pp.) term paper, and do two in-class presentations on a particular topic or work of scholarship.
FILM573: Working Images
CANCELLED
Anna Grimshaw, M 9-12
Same as ILA 790
Content: This course offers an introduction to image-based forms of inquiry. Students will explore how different visual media – photography, film, video and hyper-media – have been used in the context of social research. The course will be built around particular case studies – for example, the work of Jo Spence, Roderick Coover, Frederick Wiseman, David MacDougall, John Berger and Jean Mohr. Students will be expected to develop a small image-based project within the context of the course.
Key reading: Sarah Pink (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography; David MacDougall (1998) Transcultural Cinema; Jon Prosser Image-Based Research (1998)
FILM581: Classical Film Theory
Schreiber, TT 1:00-2:15, MAX: 5
Mandatory screening Tu 6-8pm
Content: This lecture class, the first part of a year-long course in film theory, provides a firm grounding in works on the cinema written prior to 1968. In addition to helping students acquire a foundational knowledge of classical film theory, the other major goal of this course is to train students to write about film in a theoretically informed manner, so please note that this course will be writing intensive.
Texts: TBA
Pratt, TTh 2:30-3:45, Max: 14
Mandatory film screening Mon. 8-10pm
Content: This course explores the evolution of non-fiction cinema from the "actualite's" of the late 19th century to the contemporary obsession with so-called "reality television." We will focus in particular on the ways in which documentary films have worked to shape our perceptions of reality and history, and on the unique practical, aesthetic, and ethical issues which separate non-fiction filmmaking from other forms of cultural production.
FILM
597R 00P: Directed Study
Faculty
Prerequisite: Written
permission of instructor prior to preregistration.
FILM
599R 00P: Thesis Research
Faculty
Prerequisite: Consent
of Instructor.
This course familiarizes students with basic film form and style, and it is then devoted to issues of critical analysis, aesthetic positions, historical inquiry and cultural criticism. We will survey influential approaches to narrative filmmaking as well as alternative strategies, using films from different countries as examples.
This course familiarizes students with basic film form and style, and it is then devoted to issues of critical analysis, aesthetic positions, historical inquiry and cultural criticism. We will survey influential approaches to narrative filmmaking as well as alternative strategies, using films from different countries as examples.
This course familiarizes students with basic film form and style, and it is then devoted to issues of critical analysis, aesthetic positions, historical inquiry and cultural criticism. We will survey influential approaches to narrative filmmaking as well as alternative strategies, using films from different countries as examples.
1st session. Credit, 1-4 hrs. S/U
This project course can involve an internship or film production. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Internship is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given. Although the Department of Film Studies occasionally can find internships for students, students are encouraged to arrange projects on their own. Internships require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, a journal, and an eight-page paper. Film production projects require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, the submission of production notes, and a final product.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
2nd session. Credit, 1-4 hrs. S/U
This project course can involve an internship or film production. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Internship is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given. Although the Department of Film Studies occasionally can find internships for students, students are encouraged to arrange projects on their own. Internships require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, a journal, and an eight-page paper. Film production projects require a minimum of ten hours of work per week, the submission of production notes, and a final product.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
1st session. Credit, 4 hrs.
A supervised project in an area of study to be determined by instructor and student in the semester preceding the independent study. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Directed Study is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given. Requirements: Directed readings are arranged with the instructor.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
2nd session. Credit, 4 hrs.
A supervised project in an area of study to be determined by instructor and student in the semester preceding the independent study. Students are to formulate their projects before approaching the member of the Film Studies faculty with whom they wish to work. The project should be discussed the semester before the Directed Study is to be undertaken. Under no circumstances will retroactive credit be given. Requirements: Directed readings are arranged with the instructor.
Prerequisite: Students MUST be Film Studies majors or minors and should be close to completing the course of study in film. Permission of a Film Studies faculty member is REQUIRED in advance.
1st and 2nd sessions. Credit, 1-12 hrs.
Consent of Instructor.
1st and 2nd sessions. Credit, 4 hrs.
Consent of Instructor.