This course introduces what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
Instructor(s): J. Lastra Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): This is the first part of a two-quarter course.

This course will read and discuss the body of film theory that emerged after 1960, beginning with the work in film semiology of Christian Metz, through the theorists of the sixties that David Rodowick includes under the term “political modernism;” the theorist associated with Screen (such as Stephen Heath) and their debates with the Post Theorists such as Bordwell and Carroll, the work of Stanley Cavell on film, and ending with a consideration of Giles Deleuze and his Cinema books. ,This course will read and discuss the body of film theory that emerged after 1960, beginning with the work in film semiology of Christian Metz, through the theorists of the sixties that David Rodowick includes under the term “political modernism;” the theorist associated with Screen (such as Stephen Heath) and their debates with the Post Theorists such as Bordwell and Carroll, the work of Stanley Cavell on film, and ending with a consideration of Giles Deleuze and his Cinema books.

How did Soviets see themselves in history? How was Soviet progress through history visually represented? Did modes of representing history in film change over time? This course will interrogate the tensions between different styles of visual and narrative representation of history and how these tensions arise from the methods and ideological implications of representing historical reality in Soviet cinema. The corpus of films for this course aims to represent a diachronic survey of Soviet cinema and its treatment of history and realism. Screenings will be supplemented with primary and secondary literature covering the first two thirds of Russian history of the twentieth century. The selected films and readings are organized to investigate how films structure the perception of history and reality in the context of the Soviet Union. We want to ask what are the aesthetic and political implications of films made between the mid-1920s and the early 1970s? How did these films represent the revolutionary history and the revolutionary present? How were they shaped by political circumstances? What is the connection between aesthetic transitions and social and political changes in Soviet culture?We will begin with films made in the aftermath of the October Revolution, investigating how political demands and practical necessities combined to shape drastic developments in film style and the treatment of history and reality. After the revolutionary Avant-Garde films of the 1920s, we shall scrutinize the impact of Stalinism on Soviet film style. The trajectory of the course will then lead us to conclude with films of the Thaw, the period of cultural and political liberalization that followed the death of Stalin. As we move through these periods of Soviet history, we will consider how political limits, stylistic conditions, and industry developments shaped the content and form of Soviet cinema from the October Revolution to the Post-Stalinist period. As we investigate these cultural and political contexts, we also want to delineate the connections between different definitions of what Soviet cinema was supposed to be. This investigation will be based on theories regarding the film medium and will involve considering how different filmmakers emphasized particular properties of the medium.

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, cinephilia, film criticism and theory, politics, art, ethnography, sociology, and philosophy. With an examination of canonical and lesser-known films, we will pursue our study of film from the standpoint of cinematic ontology and French cultural and political history. We shall explore how this cinema considerably expanded the parameters of modernism and intellectual thought as well as redirected assumptions surrounding the medium’s formal and aesthetic capacities.

PQ: CMST 10100 Introduction to Film Analysis, or consent of instructor.

This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Students are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques focus on the handheld camera versus tripod, interviewing and microphone placement, and lighting for the interview. Postproduction covers editing techniques and distribution strategies. Students then screen final projects in a public space.

Prerequisite(s): CMST 23930/ARTV 23930

The musical was perhaps the most alien genre when it first landed in China in early 1930s, derived as it was from Western theatrical and musical traditions. Yet it soon inspired two enduring Chinese film genres: the song-and-dance films that thrived on modern entertainment culture, and the opera films that aimed to deliver and enhance the allure of traditional opera. To answer Adrian Martin’s call for “Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond and Against Hollywood,” this course explores the theoretical and methodological possibilities opened up by the variety of Chinese musical films from the 1930s to the 2000s. The films under discussion include musical comedy, opera adaptation, martial-arts opera film, Hong Kong musical, Maoist opera film, MTV-style film by Wong Kar-wai, and most certainly the “apocalyptic” musical named by Martin, The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, 1998). The tripartite developments of Chinese-language cinemas provide a privileged site to chart the ways the musical genre expands, transforms, and rejuvenates cross time and borders.

Since the 1960s the essay film has emerged as one of the most inventive nonfiction forms of filmmaking. What makes a film “essayistic”? How do we recognize a filmic essay? Does the film essay present affinities with the literary essay in the lineage of Montaigne, who many consider as being the inventor of the personal essay? And if so, what do these similarities or differences consist in? How does the essay explore the intersection between objective and subjective, factual and personal, memory and the present? The screenings will survey a range of work of canonical film/video essayists such as Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Erroll Morris, and Ross McElwee, as well as works challenging theoretical assessments. A series of meetings will be set up as a workshop during which students will present texts and film clips in order to discuss key issues related to the essay film. The course will culminate in the creation of a short video essay where students will test their theoretical understanding through practice. This class offers also the opportunity for students who want to engage with a larger body of films, to develop methodological considerations how to conduct their investigation. Objectives include acquiring knowledge about a broad range of film styles and practices associated with the essay film, understanding how the essay film has been theorized, engaging in a creative form with the filmic and critical material, and gaining insight in research methodologies.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended

This course examines forms of cinema and related audio-visual media that exceed the boundaries of the usual cinematic dispositif: projector behind the spectator, screen containing a diegetic world, spectators rapt in silent attention.  As Foucault famously describes it, the dispositif is a “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions… The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.”  Agamben has expanded the term includinmg “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so … but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--why not--language itself..."

We will focus on these definitions, but also on the simpler idea of a deployment of media in a particular, culturally and socially defined form. I am particularly interested in forms that include the spectator in the space of representation/experience, including 3-D, surround-sound, multimedia installations, sound art, but also earlier forms like panoramas, stereographs, and music performance.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin wrote: “Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour?” In this course, we will undertake a study of modernity as both a philosophical concept and historical phenomenon by focusing on film style, cinema culture, film exhibition practices, and the visual culture and urban milieu of Paris—“the capital of the 19th century”—between 1890 and 1925. Knowledge of French is desirable, but not required.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the invention of two distinctly American literary archetypes: the cowboy and the hobo.  Based on historical conditions of labor, economics, and westward expansion, the cowboy and the hobo, though both itinerant workers primarily employed seasonally in agriculture and ranching, were depicted very differently in literature and, later, film, during the decades in which they held influence over America’s imagination and mythologization of itself.  Evoking responses from fear to admiration and from pity to envy, the cowboy and the hobo, both as historical figures and as fictional types, reflected the evolving realities of—and the broad range of attitudes toward—labor, masculinity, and place in a modernizing America.

This course will treat the style of a number of American Hollywood feature film directors during the two decades after World War II, including Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, and others. These directors were singled out at that time by the critics writing for the French journal Cahiers du Cinema as auteurs, directors with a consistent style. Critics in France, England, and the USA used the term mise en scene to discuss their use of framing, performance, editing, and camera movement and especially their use of new technologies such as wide screen and color. This course will explore the concept of directors’ style as well as the mode of close analysis criticism that grew out of this concept.

Prerequisite(s): PQ: CMST 10100 Introduction to Film or consent of instructor.

Henri Bergson famously said in his 1900 essay on Laughter that the “mechanical inelasticity” of the living is the source of the comic. Taking this claim as the point of departure for our inquiry, this course looks into the ways “machine” informs our understanding of comedy in the age of technological modernity, which is significantly mediated by the cinematic apparatus. What were the new forms of comedy emerged in the twentieth century? How did filmmakers update the timeless art of comedy in the machine-age? We will review both established and recent theorizations of film comedy as we sample representative works from international cinema, including early trick films, animation, slapstick, inter-war avant-garde cinema, as well as masterpieces by the great comic minds from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Yasujiro Ozu, Yuan Muzhi, and Jacques Tati.

This seminar will look at the history of editing from early attempts at multi-shot sequencing to the self-conscious experiments in “intellectual montage;” at editing techniques ranging from cross-cutting to CGI sequences; and at a variety of montage theories from Eisenstein and Pudovkin to Bazin. ,This seminar will look at the history of editing from early attempts at multi-shot sequencing to the self-conscious experiments in “intellectual montage;” at editing techniques ranging from cross-cutting to CGI sequences; and at a variety of montage theories from Eisenstein and Pudovkin to Bazin.

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 MW 1:30-2:50, C 307
Screening T 7:00-10:00, LC 201

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