Fall 2022
FILM STUDIES
FILM-ST 231 – Film & TV Production Concepts
Instructor: Kevin Anderson
Credits: 3
Meeting: Tu & Th 11:30-12:45
This class provides an overview of film and television production principles and processes from script to screen and also prepares students for later hands-on production courses. We will explore both the art and craft of film and digital motion picture production, including the roles and functions of the major creative and technical personnel in the scripting, pre-production, production, and post-production phases. Technical aspects such as digital vs. analog media, lighting and color, cinematography, production design, editing concepts, sound recording, and storytelling and script-writing will be covered. In addition, students are given three options for producing a creative project for the course.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: I, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N/A (E)
Italian 350 – Italian Film
Instructor: Andrea Malaguti
Meeting: Tu & Th 2:30-3:45
Credits: 4
Course taught in English. Re-examines Italian neo-realism and the filmmakers' project of social
reconstruction after Fascism. How Italian film produces meanings and pleasures through semiotics and
psychoanalysis, so as to understand the specific features of Italian cinema, its cultural politics, and the
Italian contribution to filmmaking and formal aesthetics. Course taught in English. (Gen. Ed. AT)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N, E
FILM-ST 354 – Adaption From Text to Film
Instructor: Olga Gershenson
Credits: 4
Meeting: Tu & Th 2:30-3:45
This course approaches adaptation in two different senses: media to media and culture to culture. In both cases, we will ask questions about the nature of transformation. What is gained and what is lost in the transition? As a case study, we will focus on cinematic adaptations of Jewish literature and the ways these films reflect and shape modern Jewish experience, including issues of identity, g
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N, E
FILM-ST 357 – Israeli TV, Global Reach
Instructor: Olga Gershenson
Credits: 4
Meeting: We 4:00-6:45
In this course, we will approach Israeli television as a window into Israel?s multicultural society, testifying to the profound social, political, and cultural transformations of the 1990s-2000s. Israeli series are streaming on platforms such as Netflix, introducing the quintessential Israeli experiences to transnational audiences. Studying Israeli television will offer us a chance to get to know the major conversations in Israeli society, while advancing our understanding of the medium itself. Along with the analysis of the representations, we will also address questions of production, distribution, and reception, including budgets, co-productions, and international remakes. All content is with English subtitles. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N, E
FILM-ST 375 – Film Writing and Criticism New Media
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Meeting: Mo 2:30-5:30
Film and screen media touch nearly every corner of popular, professional and intellectual culture, and new varieties of film writing are flourishing along with it. In addition to the force of the research essay and the art of the film review, there is now the dynamism of new media?videographic essays, podcasts, blogs, and other engagements with film. This is a course for students majoring in Film Studies. It is designed to teach advanced film and media analysis and writing skills for academic, professional, and public audiences. We dedicate our time to workshops of student writing and to analytical engagements with films, film criticism, and film theory. We study films from an array of genres, periods in film history, international cinemas, and underrepresented voices, and we challenge familiar modes of engaging film. The core work of this course is in discovering original, compelling insights into film and media and expressing those discoveries effectively in written text and in various forms of new media.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: E, JYW
FILM-ST 383 – Noir Avant-Garde Film
Instructor: Don Levine
Credits: 4
Meeting: Mo 4:00-7:30
Discussion: Tu 2:30-3:45
Discussion: Tu 4:00-5:15
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: H2, E
FILM-ST 391SF – International Science Fiction Cinema
Instructor: Chris Couch
Credits: 3
Meeting: Tu 7:00-10:00
This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G, E
FILM-ST 397C – Psycho Thrillers
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Meeting: Th 4:00-7:00
Thrillers compel audiences even as they repel with their narratives of dark secrets and cryptic menace. How can we understand the appeal of thriller movies? Is it their suspense, which lures us with its promise of mysteries that might be revealed? Is it their tales of transgression and violence, which horrify, tantalize, or spur catharsis? This class explores the psychological thriller in international cinema, the roots and characteristics of the genre as well as the ways these films offer critical portraits of hidden truths of the mind, of history, and of the inner workings of the social worlds around us. We will examine intersections between the psychological thriller and other thriller subgenres (political, erotic, action, supernatural, social, legal) as well as with such genres as horror and film noir. Films by Alfred Hitchcock, Mary Harron, Michael Haneke, David Lynch, Sally Potter, Christian Petzold, Asghar Farhadi, Lynne Ramsay, Akira Kurosawa, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jordon Peele, Alejandro Amenabar, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 397CD – Cinema of Dreams
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Meeting: M 2:30-5
Discussion: W 11-11:50
How do dreams become incorporated into films? How are dreams like movies, or the film experience like dreaming? While Hollywood has long been called a "Dream Factory," the cinema of dreams extends around the world and from the earliest history of film. We will examine the ways that dreams have signified in cinema, and especially how films can serve purposes in our lives similar to the role of dreams. Ultimately, we will explore the oneiric as a way of understanding film and as an aesthetic and stylistic approach to filmmaking. Works by Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Kim Cho-hee, Michel Gondry, Agnes Varda, David Cronenberg, Maya Deren, Michael Haneke, Jane Campion, Richard Linklater, David Lynch, Federico Fellini, Buster Keaton, Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyazaki, Charlie Kaufman, Alejandro Amenabar, Ran Slavin, Georges Melies, Alice Guy-Blache, Chloe Zhao, and others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G, E
FILM-ST 397Q – Production Sketchbook
Instructor: Patricia Montoya
Credits: 3
Meeting: Online
Video, still images and sound are used in this course to explore the fundamental character of storytelling, filmmaking and time-based art practices. Students perform all aspects of production with particular attention to developing ideas and building analytical, critical and production skills. We will read seminal written work and interviews with practicing artists in order to expand our knowledge, understanding and love for the medium. Through exercises that include weekly projects students will produce sketches aimed at exploring video as an experimentation tool. There will be special emphasis paid to sound design that includes original music, and ambient sound gathered with separate sound recorder. The class will review students the basic theoretical tools to critique their own productions and develop an understanding of the possibilities that medium offers.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: E
FILM-ST 397VL – Visiting Filmmaker Series
Instructor: Chloé Galibert-Laîné
Credits: 3
Meeting: Th 4:00-6:30
This class belongs to the Visiting Professor of the 21st c. Series. Award-winning international filmmakers and film scholars offer classes in screenwriting, directing, cinematography, and other key areas of filmmaking. Students have a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and enrich their portfolios. This class can be taken more than once, because content and faculty vary.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: E
FILM-ST 397Z – Classical Hollywood Cinema
Instructor: Barry Spence
Credits: 3
Meeting: Th 1:00-3:45 & Fr 1:25-2:15
This is a history of film course focusing on what is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age" of Hollywood. An examination of classical Hollywood cinema, this course will concentrate on the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. We will look at the production and distribution practices of the Hollywood studio system, and pay special attention to the way this preeminent form of cinema established many of the norms of the immersive film experience. Among other subjects, we will consider the construction of classical continuity by studying the narrative structures and devices, stylistic techniques, and approaches to editing of a wide range of exemplary films. Weekly in-class screenings, with separate discussion. This course fulfills the Film History I (H1) requirement of the film studies major through BDIC.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: H1, E
FILM-ST 446 – Film Documentary
Instructor: Bruce Geisler
Credits: 3
Meeting: Tu 2:30-4:30
Discussion: Tu 4:45-5:35
We will view, analyze, and discuss films by modern documentary masters such as Michael Moore ("Sicko"), Chris Paine, ("Revenge of the Electric Car"), Seth Gordon ("The King of Kong - A Fistful of Quarters"), Pamela Yates ("Granito") and many others to further the understanding of the documentary craft and art from a filmmaker's perspective. Students will also do pre-production (research and treatment) for their own short documentary, along with shorter hands-on exercises in writing narration, interview techniques, etc.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G, E
FILM-ST 493L – Experimental Film and Video
Instructor: Kevin Anderson
Credits: 3
Meeting: Th 2:30-5:30
This course explores the genre of Experimental Film and Video with a critical eye toward the history and current articulations of this form of production in both feature film and short form movies; videos. The course begins with an introduction to the genre, then explores Experimental Film; Video according to three different categories: Experimentation with Narrative, Experimentation with Structure; Form, and Experimentation with the line between Fact and Fiction. Students will emerge from this course with a solid foundation in the history and theory of experimental film; video as evidenced by writing projects, research papers, and student-produced experimental media projects.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G, E
FILM-ST 497EE – Minority, Minor Use, and Video Essay Practice
Instructor: Johannes Binotto
Credits: 2
Meeting: Tuesday Sept. 6, 13, 20 from 7:00 to 9:00.
Picking up on the concept of a "minor use of a major language" as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari this class wants to explore how to rework and reframe film history by making minor use of its major film texts (e.g. focusing on supposedly minor detail in a famous film in order to deconstruct, and/or decolonize it etc.) There are absolutely no prerequisites for participants.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: N/A
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N/A
FILM-ST 497F – 16mm Filmmaking and Tech
Instructor: David Bendiksen
Credits: 3
Meeting: Tu 4-6:30
This course is an introductory workshop in 16mm single-camera filmmaking, linear editing, and film projection intended for students interested in pursuing further creative production and coursework in film, especially toward completion of the Certificate in Film Studies. Creative work is complemented by a rigorous selection of readings and screenings. Exploration of technological possibilities to broaden student creativity will be emphasized, and the development of personal vision and style will be stressed.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: N/A
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N/A
FILM-ST 497MM – Performativity and Embodiment in Video Essay Practice.
Instructor: Johannes Binotto
Credits: 2
Meetings: Wednesdays Sept. 7, 14, 21, from 7:00 to 9:00
Instead of the traditional use of found footage in video essays this class will explore bodily engagement with film and media that is at the same time performative but also reflexive. Together we will examine the many critical potentials of such an embodied research. There are absolutely no prerequisites for participants.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: N/A
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N/A
FILM-ST 597LF – Lusophone Film Festival
Instructor: Patricia Isabel Martinho Ferreira
Credits: 1
Meeting: Sept 26, 27, 28, 29 6:30-9
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: N/A
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: N/A
FILM-ST 695C – Melodrama Effect
Instructor: Don Levine
Credits: 3
Meetings: We 4-8
This course will raise theoretical issues of spectatorship, tone (irony, distanciation, citation) gender, genre, while being firmly grounded in the formal analysis of filmic text; the construction of the filmic text and its "meaning," and the destruction of subject by means of abyssal structures (mises-en-abyme, structural or metaphoric infinite regresses); Fassbinder's ideological fatigue and complex sexual politics, Godard's political innocence (which is not the same as naivete), his cinematic energy amidst his films' increasing cultural despair. Pre-requisites: familiarity with film theory and discourse, preferably by at least two courses in film analysis. Course meets as intensive seminar, once a week for 4 hours. "Films include: Sirk -' All that Heaven Allows', Godard - 'Vivre sa vie' ;Fassbinder - 'Ali', 'Petra von Kant',' 13 Moons', 'Veronica Voss'; Haynes -' Far from Heaven'."
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR CATEGORY: D&G, E