The idea of electromechanically transmitted moving images dates back to the nineteenth century and the first technological demonstration of televised moving images took place in the 1920s. While this course touches upon the early history of television, we will focus our attention on the era between the commercialization of television in the United States (in the early 1950s) and the rise of internet-based television via services such as Hulu (in the 2000s). As we will see, the history of television in these years, intersects with numerous other media, such as radio, film, video, digital games, and the novel. Alongside a study of the medium of television and its role in American culture, we will attend carefully to the form of TV narrative as it changes from an early episodic format to the complex long-form serial narratives that attained maturity in the 1990s. Through historical, formal, and cultural analyses, we will attempt to make sense of the recent renaissance of television narrative characterized by such serial programs as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. The course combines theoretical texts with close readings of particular television shows. Requirements include engaged participation in class discussion, weekly blog entries, a mid-term paper, and a substantive final research paper. There will be no exams.

Course TR 12:00-1:20

CMST 23930; CMST 23931 or 27600; departmental approval of senior creative thesis project. This seminar will focus on how to craft a creative thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the creative thesis. The class is limited to seniors from CMS and DOVA, and MAPH students working on a creative thesis.

Time and location pending.

The insurgent film movement known as the Czech New Wave spawned such directors as the internationally acclaimed Milos Forman (The Fireman’s Ball, Loves of a Blonde), Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains), Jan Kadar (The Shop on Main Street), and Vera Chytilova (Daisies), and the lesser known but nationally inspirational Evald Schorm, Jarmir Jires, Odlrich Lipsky, and Jan Nemec. The serendipitous life of the Czech New Wave is as much a subject of the course’s inquiry as close technical and semantic research of the films themselves.

Course: TR 1:30-2:50, C 425

This experimental course explores the emerging game genre of “transmedia” or “alternate reality” gaming. Transmedia games use the real world as their platform while incorporating text, video, audio, social media, websites, and other forms. We will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. Course requirements include weekly blog entry responses to theoretical readings; an analytical midterm paper; and collaborative participation in a single narrative-based transmedia game project. No preexisting technical expertise is required but a background in any of the following areas will help: creative writing, literary or media theory, web design, visual art, computer programming, performance, and game design.

Course R 3:00-5:50

This intensive laboratory will be an introduction to 16mm film production, experimenting with various film stocks and basic lighting designs. The class will be organized around a series of production situations and students will work in crews. Each crew will learn to operate and maintain the 16mm Bolex film camera, tripod; Arri lights, gels, diffusion, and grip equipment. The final project will be an in camera edit. No prerequisites. Lab fee $100.

Course WF 1:00-3:30, LC 014

Socialist Realism was declared the official mode of Soviet aesthetic culture in 1934. Though it has been dismissed within the totalitarian model as propaganda or kitsch, this seminar will approach it from the perspective of its aesthetics. By this we mean not only its visual or literary styles, but also its sensory or haptic address to its audiences. Our premise is that the aesthetic system of Socialist Realism was not simply derivative or regressive, but developed novel techniques of transmission and communication; marked by a constant theoretical reflection on artistic practice, Socialist Realism redefined the relationship between artistic and other forms of knowledge, such as science. Operating in an economy of art production and consumption diametrically opposed to the Western art market, Socialist Realism challenged the basic assumptions of Western artistic discourse, including the concept of the avant-garde. It might even be said to offer an alternate model of revolutionary cultural practice, involving the chronicling and producing of a non-capitalist form of modernity. The seminar will focus on Soviet visual art, cinema and fiction during the crucial period of the 1930s under Stalin (with readings available in translation), but we welcome students with relevant research interests that extend beyond these parameters. Conducted jointly by professors Robert Bird (Slavic and Cinemaand Media Studies, University of Chicago) and Christina Kiaer, Art History, Northwestern University, course meetings will be divided evenly between the campuses of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Course W 1:30-4:20

The uncanny is an experience or quality that by definition remains difficult to grasp: something that is mysterious and enigmatic, yet also seems oddly familiar. To explore this term this seminar will draw largely on a tradition of commentary on the German word Das Unheimliche, usually translated as uncanny, that can be trace among Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger and it relevance to film and media studies. Freud and his disciple Otto Rank before 1920 related the uncanny to the cinema, and cinema’s ability to evoke the uncanny has been frequently observed. On the one hand, the cinema’s ability to portray uncanny events (as in Rank and Freud’s invocation of the 1913 film The Student of Prague) appears generically in films of fantasy or horror. In addition, some theorists have felt that film as a medium could be best approached via the uncanny. In this seminar we will read a series of the keys texts and try to survey the terrain of the concept of the uncanny. We will screen films that evoke the experience through their narrative and stylistics, and we will discuss the usefulness of the term for theorizing both film and electronic media, both new and old.

Course: W 1:30-4:20, C 310 Screening W 7:00-10:00, C 307

PQ: CMST 23930; CMST 23931 or 27600; departmental approval of senior creative thesis project. This seminar will focus on how to craft a creative thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the creative thesis. The class is limited to seniors from CMS and DOVA, and MAPH students working on a creative thesis.

Time and location pending.

Description forthcoming.

Course: TR 10:30-11:50, LC 801
Screening: T 7:00-10:00, LC 201

Feminism in Great Britain, France, and America has produced a rigorous intellectual, theoretical, and aesthetic legacy within the field of film studies. This course will explore the central debates of feminist psychoanalytic film theory (the patriarchal unconscious; Hollywood narrative; the gaze; genre; visual/female pleasure; masochism; the female spectator; resistant spectators) and criticism as we also integrate the contemporary movement of feminist historiography into our central mode of inquiry. The theoretical debates surrounding the critique of language, the question of feminine writing, cinécriture, and the female author will inform our investigation of the radical aesthetics of feminist counter cinema. Films include: Queen Christina; Orlando; Craig’s Wife; Le Bonheur; Vertigo; Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Mahogany; Salome; Fuses; Riddles of the Sphynx; Film About a Woman Who...; Jeanne Dielman; Tapage Nocturne; Sex is Comedy.

T/TH 12:00-1:20 C310 
screening: Thursday 3:30 - 6:30 C307

The New Wave. The Neo-Avant Garde. Rarely have these film and art movements been placed into an explicit historical or theoretical dialog or dialectic. It will be the task of this seminar to do just that. We will begin our study with a brief look into the pre-WWII situation of radical art and film movements, and classic theories of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. Turning our attention to the rise of Lettrism within the context of post-war film and art culture, we will subsequently evaluate the conditions that surrounded the emergence of New Wave filmmaking and criticism, and that include the Situationist International and Nouveau Réalisme. As we move toward and beyond the events of May 1968, we will bring our study of social documentary, politically militant forms, collective film and art practices, and historiography to bear on purportedly stable understandings of the New Wave, its art historical forebearers, and its heirs. Reading knowledge of French is required. While some of our texts will appear in English translation, many will not. The seminar will be conducted in English, but the last thirty minutes of each session will be conducted in French. This component is intended to improve students’ oral proficiency, but it will not be used in student evaluation. Screenings are mandatory. With some possible exceptions, films will be subtitled. Students enrolled in FREN 43713 will be required to complete all reading and writing in French.

Friday 1:30 - 4:20 C310
screening: Tues 3:30- 6:30 LC201

This course examines major texts in film theory from Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg in the 1910s through André Bazin's writings in the 1940s and 1950s. We will devote special attention to the emergence of issues that continue to be of major importance, such as the film/language analogy, film semiotics, spectatorship, realism, montage, the modernism/mass culture debate, and the relationship between film history and film style. We will concentrate on the major theoretical writings of Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Bela Balazs, Bazin, as well as writings by Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Jean Mitry, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and others.

Course: W 3:00-5:50, LC 801
Screening: W 7:00-10:00, LC 201

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.

Course: TR 10:30-11:50, C 307
Screening: T 7:00-10:00, C 307

Cinema and videogames are two moving-image-based media, and, especially over the past two decades, each has been credited with influencing the other. But how deep do their similarities actually go? This course will investigate the raw materials and basic forms at the disposal of videogame developers and filmmakers, and analyze how these materials and forms shape viewer and player responses. In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers? How does each medium segment and present space, time, and action? What aesthetic effects are open to games that are not open to cinema, and vice versa? What have practitioners in each medium learned from those of the other, and have some of these lessons perhaps been misapplied? All of these questions and more will be fair game for the investigations ahead, which will consist of an examination of films alongside games—including entries from the Uncharted franchise, the Half-Life franchise, and with a special focus on horror games (especially the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series).

Course: MW 1:30-2:50, LC 028
Screening: M 7:00-10:00, LC 201

This course will explore post-World War II film from Poland – approaching the works both as examples of the cinematic art in the region, and as a lens through which to view developments and transformations in East European culture. We will view ten films by most renowned directors from Poland. The course will assess what the end of World War II, followed by joining the Eastern Bloc, the fall of communism, and finally by the entry into post-Soviet Europe have meant for the film culture and the Polish national film tradition. We will also consider how Eastern European cinematic discourse is undergoing – or should undergo – revision, viewing it as an increasingly transnational phenomenon, rather than the example of a national film industry. The films will be viewed in the original language with English subtitles. 

class: TU/TH 10:30 - 11:50am, C425
scr:  WE 3:30 - 6:30, C307

No single filmmaker has equaled Alfred Hitchcock’s combination of popular success, critical commentary and widespread influence on other filmmakers. Currently, his work is so familiar it threatens to be taken for granted. This course will reveal Hitchcock as the filmmaker who systematically used the stylistics of late silent film to forge a dialectical approach to the so-called Classical Style. Hitchcock devised a relation among narrative, spectator and character point of view, yielding a configuration of suspense, sensation and perception. Tracing Hitchcock’s career chronologically, we will follow his intertwining of sexual desire and gender politics, and his reshaping of melodrama according to Freudian concepts of repression, memory, interpretation and abreaction, as he navigates from silent film to sound and from Great Britain to Hollywood. Students must have taken Introduction to Film, and preferably Film History 1.

Course: TR 1:30-2:50, LC 201
Screening: T 3:30-6:30, LC 201

The seminar will discuss the workings of the face –as figure of subjectivity, as imprint of identity, as privileged object of representation, as mode and ethic of address – through film theory and practice. How has cinema responded to the mythic and iconic charge of the face, to the portrait’s exploration of model and likeness, identity and identification, the revelatory and masking play of expression, the symbolic and social registers informing the human countenance? At this intersection of archaic desires and contemporary anxieties, the face will serve as our medium by which to reconsider, in the cinematic arena, some of the oldest questions on the image. Among the filmmakers and writers who will inform our discussion are Balázs, Epstein, Kuleshov, Dreyer, Pasolini, Hitchcock, Warhol, Bresson, Bazin, Barthes, Doane, Aumont, Didi-Huberman, and others.

Course: W 10:30-1:20, C 310
Screening: M 3:30-6:30, LC 201

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the twentieth century. This course explores the range and variety of Brecht's own theater, from the anarchic plays of the 1920s to the agitprop Lehrstück to the classical parable plays, as well as the works of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill), and sub-Saharan Africa (Soyinka, Ngugi, and various South African theater practitioners). We also consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht's own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard.

CMST 10100. Required of all Cinema and Media Studies majors. 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.