Cinema Studies
Cinema Studies
01:175:315 American Cinema I
- Course Description:
This class traces the history of film in the United States from its beginnings in Thomas Edison’s West Orange laboratory to the collapse of the Hollywood studio system model in the late 1940s. Topics include the development of screen narrative, the coming of sound, censorship issues, exhibition practices, silent cinema, and the influence of European films and filmmakers. Screenings feature the work of Griffith, Hawks, Murnau, Capra, Welles and others. Response essays and term paper required.
01:175:202 Intro to Film 2
- Course Description:
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.
- Instructor(s): DAVID FRESKO (Assistant Undergraduate Director), SUSAN MARTIN-MÁRQUEZ
01:175:398 Internship in Cinema Studies
- Course Description:
By arrangement
- Instructor(s): ALBERT GABRIEL NIGRIN
01:175:377 Topics in World Cinema: Hitchcock and Beyond
- Course Description:
This course will examine questions of cinematic authorship (in addition to other theoretical concerns) through one of the medium’s most influential figures: Alfred Hitchcock. We will trace Hitchcock’s formal and thematic development across major films from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and then place this body of work in dialogue with filmmakers such as Michael Powell, Luis Buñuel, Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, Chantal Akerman, Bette Gordon, and more. Themes relating to voyeurism, psychosis, perversion, surveillance, paranoia, gender, sexuality, and reflexivity will feature prominently. In addition to gaining insight into authorship and the workings of the cinematic apparatus more generally, students will also develop proficiency with frameworks for critical analysis, including genre, ideology, form, psychoanalysis, feminist critique, and queer theory among others.
- Instructor(s): DAVID FRESKO (Assistant Undergraduate Director)
01:175:377 Topics in World Cinema: Editing: History and Theory
- Course Description:
“Editing: History and Theory.” Editing—the juxtaposition of images and sounds—has been widely understood to be the compositional foundation for a film’s construction. It is the means by which a narrative is sequence and arranged as well as a method for generating a host of perceptual effects in the mind’s eye of the spectator. This course will examine the history, theory, and multiple styles of editing that have informed cinematic practice from the medium's dawn at the end of the 19th century through the present. Moments in the history of editing to be studied will be so-called primitive cinema, Classical Hollywood continuity editing, the Soviet avant-garde, European art cinema, political modernist film, documentary film, various avant-garde movements, and the development of postproduction workflows in contemporary digital cinema. Readings will be rich and varied. Drawing extensively on film theory by Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, Annette Michelson, and others, we will extend the significance of editing beyond the splicing together of shots in order to highlight its constructive, analytical, affective, and ideological dimensions.
- Instructor(s): DAVID FRESKO (Assistant Undergraduate Director)