01:175:201 Intro to Film 1 (Fresko)
This course introduces students to analytical concepts for understanding how films “work” at levels of form, theme, and culture. Through close analyses of individual films, we will see how spectators’ experiences and interpretations are shaped by cinematic techniques such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound design, among others. We will also examine the historical, cultural, and political conditions that impact who gets to make films and why according to race, gender, class, and geography. By learning how to “read” a film via terminology specific to the cinema, students will develop the ability to examine the cinema as an art, an experience, and a cultural artifact. To this end, we will generate a shared vocabulary so that we can all speak and write with intelligence, confidence, and specificity about the how movies make meaning and affect us in various ways
01:175:202:01 Intro to Film II (Martin- Márquez)
In this course, we will discuss some of the major modes and styles of fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, inside and outside of Hollywood, as well as several key approaches to film analysis. We will begin with an intensive introduction to Hollywood classical filmmaking and close textual analysis: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and sound (this may be a review for students who have taken Introduction to Film 1 or equivalent courses elsewhere). This will be followed by an exploration of genre and its permutations within different cultural contexts (looking at specific examples of the Western and melodrama), together with the concept of authorship (auteur theory), and performance and star image. We will then briefly discuss alternatives to classical narrative filmmaking from experimental filmmaking to the New Cinema and Counter Cinema movements of the 1960s and beyond. In the last part of the semester, we will consider (mostly) non-fiction filmmaking documentary, mockumentary, and doc-fiction hybrids.
01:175:265:01 American Experimental Film (Nigrin)
In-depth analyses of the structure and content of films by Andy Warhol, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Sidney Peterson, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Yoko Ono, and others. Emphasis on the "mise-en-scene," editing, narrative form, sound, and special effects in the films of these celebrated experimental filmmakers. Warning: some films may contain nudity, sexual situations, violence, profanity, substance abuse, and disturbing images.
01:175:320:01 World Cinema I (Williams)
A survey of the history of world cinema (including American cinema, to the extent that it participates in the global evolution of the medium), from its beginnings in the 1890s to post-World War II developments such as Italian Neorealism.
01:175:377:01 Tpcs in World Cinema: Film & Revolution (Fresko)
This course examines how film has envisioned and participated in revolutionary and proto-revolutionary movements from the 1920s to the present. Students will gain insight into debates regarding film aesthetics and politics in contexts such as the former Soviet Union, Third World Liberation, the African American freedom struggle, the global New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s movement, and more. We will also assess recent attempts to memorialize the revolutionary past via documentaries and docudramas. Seminar-style discussions will analyze filmmaking in its historical and theoretical complexity, touching above all on how filmmakers set out to challenge commercial cinemas at the level of form and content and reshape social relations (i.e. race, gender, class, sexuality and national identities) with the cinematic apparatus. Films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Santiago Álvarez, Sara Gómez, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, the Newsreel Collective, the L.A. Rebellion, Lizzie Borden, Hito Steyerl, and more will be included. Readings will be equally varied and challenging, but also engaging and thought provoking, drawing at once from film theory as well as left political philosophies of aesthetics, organizing, identity, and revolution.
01:175:377:02 Tpcs in World Cinema: Filmic Identities; Spain and Argentina (Martin- Márquez)
Cinema may contribute powerfully to the construction of social identities, and the interaction between films and audiences is often especially complex during authoritarian regimes and in their aftermath. In this course we will examine films produced from the 1960s to the present in Spain and Argentina, both of which have experienced periods of dictatorial rule as well as transitions to democracy, in order to explore their reflection of and intervention in processes of identity production (as inflected by kinship, national formations, race/ethnicity, class, religious belief, gender, sexuality, health and dis/ability, and life stages). We will study films by internationally acclaimed directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Lucrecia Martel, Luis Buñuel, Isabel Coixet, Julio Medem, and Lucía Puenzo.
Readings and class discussions will be in English, and all films will be subtitled. Students wishing to receive Spanish major/minor credit for this course must complete all written work in Spanish.
01:175:398: Internship in Cinema Studies (Nigrin)
By arrangement