Undergraduate Courses (list)

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.