MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE 

Film & Video Course Guide FALL 2008 (updated 4/5/08)

 

FLMST- 201   INTRODUCTION TO FILM           

TTH 11-12:15, 220 ART and T 7-9 (Film. Scr) Dwight 101?

Blaetz              

Five College Film Studies Major category: #1

This course teaches the basic concepts and critical skills involved in interpreting film. Through lecture, reading, discussion, and screening of films both in and outside of class, the student will become a more informed and sophisticated observer of the cinema. During the first half of the semester, the class will study form and style in narrative film as well as in nonnarrative practices such as avant-garde and documentary filmmaking. For the remainder of the course, the class will examine some of the major critical approaches in the field.

                                                                                                                                   

FLMST- 203  INTRO TO SPANISH & LATIN AMERICAN FILM (SPAN-221)

TTH 11-12:15 PM, location TBA                      

Gundermann    

*Note: “Intro to Film” course taught in Spanish                                                                 

Five College Film Studies Major category: #1

This course offers a broad introduction to the history, politics and aesthetics of Latin American and Spanish cinema in the context of, and in contrast with, cinemas from other regions, especially hegemonic Hollywood aesthetics. This course will also focus specifically on introducing students to the basic terminology and methodologies of film analysis, thus preparing them for the department's film seminar (Spanish 320) and other advanced courses in film studies.

 

FLMST-210-01  PRODUCTION WORKSHOP                                                      

TH 9:00am-12:00 PM    , LBRY 231 and W 7-9  PM      LBRY 231

Perlin                                                                                                                                       

Five College Film Studies Major category:  #8

In this class we plunge into the multiple, overlapping, and contradictory histories and practices of experimental film and video. We will investigate the structures of experimental media and its makers' deep understanding of craft and material. We will unpack the term 'experimental' and create our own videos that engage, embrace, and dismantle traditional practices. We begin by looking at historical works and move into analyzing contemporary experimental media. This is a beginning course that covers the basics of shooting video, lighting, audio, and digital editing in the context of the above themes.

 

FLMST-220-01 MUSIC AND FILM                                                

MWF 10-10:50 AM,  Pratt Memorial Music Bldg 109     

Sanford

Five College Film Studies Major category: #6     

For all who stay to the end of the credits, purchase soundtracks, and argue over who should have won the Oscar for Best Score, along with anyone else interested in the undervalued importance of music to the general effect of a motion picture, this course will explore and discuss the myriad ways in which these two media interact. The course will focus on classic scores by Herrmann, Morricone, and Williams, as well as the uses of existing music in films of Bergman and Kubrick.

 

FLMST-220-02  AMERICAN GOTHIC       (ENGL 243)                 

Time/location TBA                                                       

Young 

Five College Film Studies Major category:  #6 (Component)

(Film Studies Component Course.) An examination of the gothic - a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity - in American literature and culture, with an emphasis upon issues of race and gender. Topics to include: the gothic; gothic sexuality; Southern, Northern, and national gothic; freakishness and grotesquerie; and visual gothic. Focus on fiction, with some film and photography. Authors and artists may include Alcott, Arbus, Browning, Crafts, Crane, Dunbar, Dunn, Faulkner, Gilman, Hawthorne, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Oates, Parks, Poe, and Romero.

 

FLMST-230-01 DOCUMENTARY FILM                                                   

TTH 2:40-3:55 PM, 220 ART and T 7-9 PM, 220 ART  

Blaetz                                                                                                                                      

Five College Film Studies Major category:  #4 & 6

This course examines the principles, methods, and styles of nonfiction film. Beginning with the 'actualités' of film history's first practitioners and ending with contemporary self-reflexive films, such as Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, the class studies films that strive to represent some aspect of the real world as opposed to the fictional worlds of narrative cinema.

 

FLMST-320-01 SEMINAR: PLAYING THE PAST:  HISTORY ON STAGE & FILM (THEAT 350-01)             

W 1:15-4:05, location TBA        

Weckworth                  

Five College Film Studies Major category:  #7

Description TBA

                                               

FLMST- 370-01 FRANCOPHONE CINEMA: OUSMANE SEMBENE

(FREN- 341)                            

T 1:15-4:05, location TBA          *(In French)

Gadjigo              

Five College Film Studies Major category:   #5  and 7      

Born in 1923 in Senegal, the writer filmmaker Ousmane Sembčne is one of the rare witnesses of the three key periods of contemporary African history: the colonial period; the period of struggle for political and economic independence; and the period of effort to eliminate neocolonialism through the rehabilitation of African cultures. This course is entirely devoted to the works of Ousmane Sembčne and will explore the key moments of his life, his activism in European leftist organizations, his discovery of writing, and most of all the dominant features of his film work.