The year 1960 is commonly understood as a watershed in United States film history, marking the end of the so-called "classical" Hollywood cinema. We will discuss this assumption in terms of the break-up of the studio system; the erosion of the Production Code; the crisis of audience precipitated by televisionÕs mass spread; and the changing modes of film reception, production, and style under the impact of video, cable, and other electronic communication technologies. We will also relate cinema to social and political issues of the post-1960s period (Civil Rights, student and women's movements, the Vietnam war, urban crisis, reproductive freedom, AIDS, the Reagan/Bush era, and the end of the Cold War) and ask how films reflected upon and intervened in contested areas of public and private experience. With the help of the concept of "genre" (and the changed "genericity" of 1980s and '90s films) and of the notion of "national cinema" (usually applied to film traditions other than the United States), we will attempt a dialogue between industrial/stylistic and cultural-studies approaches to film history.

Although the horror genre is often considered to begin in the early 1930s with the enormous successes Tod Browning’s Dracula, James Whale’s Frankenstein and the rest of Universal Studios’ classic monster cycle, the horrific – terror, shock, revulsion – has been an important part of the cinema since its inception. In this course, we will explore the nature of horror and the horrific in the cinema and the various perspectives that can be utilized to understand these films and their continued, remarkably resilient global appeal. The syllabus will include readings on such topics as the uncanny, the fantastic, monstrosity, abjection, anxiety, gender identity, and spectacle. The primary focus of the course discussions will be on the “threat”: a concept that includes the monster or villain, the actions or intended actions of that monster, and the way they are depicted onscreen. Although the course will attempt a long view of the genre’s history and will deal with international examples (particularly J-horror, a cycle of Japanese horror films from the 1990s and early 2000s), the privileged films in this course will be American, and from what may be understood as the beginning of the modern or post-classical era of the genre: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, especially the “slasher” film and its forerunners. We will deal with the increasing centrality of displays of violence and gore to the genre and the expansion of the genre to include physically unremarkable villains and little to no trace of the supernatural, which seems to culminate in the recent phenomenon of “torture porn” – as well as the concurrent spread of monsters and the monstrous into works that are decidedly outside of the horror genre (i.e. Twilight). What significance do these and other recent developments have for our understanding of horror and for the importance of the monster to the genre? Can these changes help us to understand earlier, more classical works of horror? Filmmakers to be discussed include Whale, Hitchcock, Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Rob Zombie.

CMST 10100. Required of all Cinema and Media Studies concentrators. This seminar is designed to provide senior concentrators with a sense of the variety of methods and approaches in the field (such as formal analysis, cultural history, industrial history, reception studies, psychoanalysis). Students will present material relating to their B.A. project, which will be discussed in relation to the issues of the course.

We shall analyze films and fictional works that reflect both realities and myths about the “Eternal City,” Rome. Classical Rome will not be studied; instead the focus will be on a trajectory of works, both written and cinematic, that are set in and explore late nineteenth to late twentieth-century Rome. The goal is to analyze some of the numerous diverse representations of modern Rome that portray historical, political, subjective, and/or fantastical/mythopoetic elements that have interacted over time to produce the palimpsest that is the city of Rome. Books by D’Annunzio, Moravia, Pasolini and Malerba; films by Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Moretti. Taught in English; Italian majors will read the texts in the original Italian.

This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We will discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.

Problematic images of Blackness have plagued the cinema since its very birth. This course will concentrate on examining the ways that African Americans have responded to this history of (mis)representation both as filmmakers and as spectators. In this manner, we will analyze how African American filmmakers have themselves approached the question of how to represent Blackness. As well, we will investigate how African American audiences have negotiated their position as spectators. Moreover, we will examine other cinemas within the Black diaspora and identify if/how the patterns and concerns of various Black cinemas overlap. Throughout the quarter we will consider the overarching question of what is Black cinema?

Slavoj _i_ek has used film as the great expositor of his theories of ideology, perversion, sexuality, politics, nostalgia, and otherness. In this discussion-heavy course we will watch a lot of film from the directorial subjects of his main discussions (Chaplin; Rossellini; Lynch; Haneke; Kie_lowski; Tarkovsky; von Trier; Hitchcock and others) alongside Zizek’s theoretical writings on their film. The course examines why for the man who has been called the “Elvis of cultural theory” film is such a perfect lens through which to examine social situatedness and intersubjective *aporia*. There is no “paperwork” assigned for the course. The course is conducted seminar style and participants are expected to be vocal, prepared and somewhat ornery.

PQ: Consent of instructor. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. This course may not be counted toward distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a free-elective credit.

Neither a coherent movement nor a precise style, La Nouvelle Vague was nonetheless a watershed moment in the history of modernism. In this class, we will study the French New Wave’s emergence from the context of post WWII modernization and Existentialism, cinephilia and film criticism and theory. With an examination of canonical and lesser-known films (1950-early 1970s), we will pursue our study from the standpoint of cinematic ontology and French cultural and political history. We shall explore how this cinema considerably expanded the parameters of modern art practice and intellectual thought as well as redirected assumptions surrounding the medium’s formal and philosophic capacities. Films by Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut, Godard, Eustache, Varda, Raynal, Chabrol, Rouch, Resnais, Garrel, and others.

From the treaty port of Shanghai to the imperial capital of Beijing, from the “re-colonized” city of Taipei to the “floating city” of Hong Kong, and from an anonymous city in inland China to global Chinatowns, cities in Chinese-language cinemas at once reflect and participate in the historical transformations of modern China and the negotiation between national, local and cosmopolitan identities. Meanwhile, throughout its history, the motion-picture medium has shown an affinity with the city as an audio-visual ensemble, which in turn has provided constant inspiration for cinematic experimentation. Taking the chronotope of the “sinophone city” as an entry point, this course participates in both the on-going discussion of cinematic cities and the emerging discourse on the phonic articulation and visual mediation of a global sinophone culture. No knowledge of Chinese is required.

The film musical appears as a quintessentially American form. From the development of the genre in synchronization with early sound technology to its full efflorescence in the MGM Broadway adaptations of the 1950s, nothing spoke the capital intensity of hallywood and the ideology of Americanism more clearly than the musical. This course studies East Asian emulation of Hollywood’s “transmedia exploitation” of popular music, revues, and musical films but also the musical that blazed regional circuits through East Asia, from “oriental jazz” and the wartime films of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Ri Ko-Ran to postwar Toho travelogues and contemporary films featuring East Asian pop stars. Main focus on Japan; also films from Hong Kong, Manchuria, and Taiwan.

This course focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of direct cinema, cinéma vérité, the essay, ethnographic film, the diary and self-reflexive cinema, historical and biographical film, agitprop/activist forms, and guerilla television are screened and discussed. Topics include the ethics and politics of representation and the shifting lines between fact and fiction. Labs explore video pre-production, camera, sound, and editing. Students develop an idea for a documentary video; form crews; and produce, edit, and screen a five-minute documentary. A two-hour lab is required in addition to class time. Lab fee $50.

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed include works by Hitchcock, Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, Sternberg, and Welles.

There has been an alternative cinema in the United States from the earliest days of Hollywood, but it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the first works of such figures as Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Anger and, especially, Maya Deren, that disparate film artists came together in what would become a coherent avant-garde filmmaking community or movement. Inspired by developments in poetry, dance, painting, and music, and by European filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Cocteau, these filmmakers set about creating a new genre of film, and a new kind of film language. A remarkable flourishing of independent, personal cinema soon followed, in an incredible variety of styles. This class will look at the historical development of the American avant-garde cinema from these early filmmakers through the intensely creative, productive period of the 1960s, and the fragmented state of the avant-garde in the years that followed. Using methodologies taken from cinema studies and other disciplines, especially art history, and looking at the films alongside contemporaneous work in other mediums, we will attempt to develop a valid critical language to describe and analyze these sui generis films and filmmakers. Filmmakers studied include Deren, Anger, Cornell, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas and Joyce Wieland.

PQ: Consent of instructor. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. This course may not be counted toward distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a free-elective credit.

This seminar explores the history of cinema as a new medium for "propaganda and agitation" in the context of Japan's wars in Asia and the Pacific, 1937-1945. The emphasis is less on policy decisions than on their cultural consequences: how did the Tripartite Alliance, the Film Law, and the military situation affect the production, distribution, and reception of cinema in Japan and the occupied territories? What are the connections between cinema and other media and is there such a thing as a wartime style? In brief, the argument of the course is that propaganda in Japan, as elsewhere, was part of a broader project of agitation. Cinema was treated as a new medium, specially tasked not only to convey "information" but to elicit intense emotions from subjects of the nation, the Empire, and local military power that justified their suffering. That project often relied to a surprising extent on medium-specific, even modernist, modes of representation. We will study Japanese films in the context of a global 1930s "reactionary modernism" while simultaneously exploring more local sources of wartime cinema, in the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde, and the broader image culture of wartime Japan. We will also explore how the medium was deployed in Japan's colonies (Taiwan and Korea), client states (Manchuria), and occupied territories (Eastern China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc). This history of cinema highlights concepts that are essential to broader histories of the period: for example: identity, complicity, nationality, and collaboration. English will be the lingua-franca for the course but we will also read primary and secondary Japanese documents, and material in other languages.

This course explores the political documentary film, its intersection with historical and cultural events, and its opposition to Hollywood and traditional media.  We will examine various documentary modes of production, from films with a social message, to advocacy and activist film, to counter-media and agit-prop.  We will also consider the relationship between the filmmaker, film subject and audience, and how political documentaries are disseminated and, most importantly, part of political struggle. 

With the exception of the Hong Kong martial arts comedies that have gained worldwide popularity in recent decades, comedy has not been a genre generally associated with Chinese-language cinemas. Yet precisely because of the "seriousness" of China’s long 20th century laden with suffering and crisis, Chinese-language comedies provide a concentrated site for the investigation of national cinema on the one hand and the generic conventions of comedy on the other. Various modes of production and style will be explored in this course, including slapstick comedy and costume drama in the silent era; left-wing romantic comedy in the 1930s; post-WWII screwball comedy; the post-1949 tripartite development of comedy in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; Chinese-American "comedy of immigration"; as well as post-modern pastiche and dark comedy from the post-new-era to the 21st century. No knowledge of Chinese is required.