2018-2019

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.

This seminar undertakes a study of primarily post-World War II French and Belgian film and art movements in order to query the different status and conceptualization of the image and its relationship to history. We will begin our study with a brief look into pre-WWII of avant-garde art and film movements, and classic theories of the avant-garde. Turning our attention to late Surrealist practices, and the rise of neo-avant-garde movements such as Lettrism and the Situationist International, we will grapple with how these groups both understood the stakes of the image and history, as well as developed theoretical models to transform the agency of both within their political aesthetics. We will subsequently ask similar questions of the films and theories that eventually define the French New Wave before moving on to think about social documentary, politically militant image production, and collective film and art practices.Reading knowledge of French is not required, but may prove beneficial. Screenings are mandatory. With some possible exceptions, all films will be subtitled. Students enrolled through the FREN section will be required to complete all reading and writing in French

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.Course Description Notes - CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended

What would it mean to say that minstrelsy was a foundational practice in the development of American popular culture, and that the emergence of American cinema must be understood through the lens of its ubiquity? This course therefore investigates the persistence of minstrelsy in American popular culture from the early 19th century to the turn of the 20th century. It traces the development of its tropes, themes, and practices from traveling tent shows to the variety theater of vaudeville and to the emergence of cinema. We will attempt to make legible the functionings of its racist caricatures, account for its popularity and longevity, and explore moments of creative resistance to its dehumanizing portrayals of African Americans. We will look at 19th century performers and composers including T.D. Rice, Billy Kersands, Stephen Foster, Bert Williams and George Walker, Ernest Hogan, May Irwin, Sissieretta Jones. We will also consider later filmmakers working with and against the racialized representations of minstrelsy including D.W. Griffith, Al Jolson, Oscar Micheaux, and Stepin Fetchit, and contemporary reimaginings, confrontations and reckonings, including those of Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Christopher Harris, and Edgar Arceneaux. Emphasis will be on methods of primary historical research as well as theories of race, gender and performance.

“Filming the police” as a research topic has been taken up in a range of disciplines and subfields from legal and information studies to surveillance and police studies.  In film and media studies, the 1991 George Holliday video of the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD played an important and controversial role in the formation of documentary studies as a subfield and in debates about indexicality, the nature of photographic evidence, and realism—issues at the core of the discipline. While this course will survey the topic of the filming of police from multiple perspectives, it aims to construct a specifically disciplinary framework for research on police violence.  What can film and media studies bring to research on police?With an eye toward this aim, over the quarter we will pursue the following questions: 1) Given the range of kinds of documentation and data of/on police violence, how should we understand the specificity of audio-visual records of police brutality? 2) How has the significance and uses of photographic documentation of state violence changed across time, context, and across a shifting media landscape? In other words, what are the differences between the uses to which images have been put in lynching photography, in Civil Rights Movement photography, in Holocaust photography, in the Rodney King video, in the Oscar Grant videos, and in the Laquan McDonald dashboard camera video? And how is the photographic documentation of state violence peculiar as compared with other forms of image-based documentation of violence? 3) What is the relation and interpenetration of cultural—especially televisual—representations of police (e.g. COPS, CSI, Law & Order, The Wire, etc.) and the actual organization and practices of law enforcement institutions and agents? 4) What are the political strategies that undergird citizen journalism and sousveillance practices such as “cop watching” and how effective (and for what) are such practices? 5) How have the videos of police violence circulated, and how have debates about the ethics of viewing shaped activism as well as aesthetic responses?Readings by Susan Sontag, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Georges Didi-Huberman, Elizabeth Alexander, Eyal Weizman, Courtney Baker, Jennifer Malkowski, Jamie Kalven, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty, Alex Vitale—among others. Topics to include dashboard and body cameras; surveillance, sousveillance, and the regime of visibility; citizen and investigative journalism; video storage and archiving; evidence in court proceedings and in the public sphere; police, media, and ideology; the ethics and politics of looking at black suffering; art about police violence; filming the police in an international frame.

This course explores the relationships between theories of the imagination and those of gender and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the relevance of this exploration to cinema and media studies.

This seminar will explore the mutual attraction of cinema and opera across the two vast operatic cultures of Europe and China in order to interrogate the many cross-cultural issues that their media encounters produce and accentuate. Such issues include changing relations to myth, ritual, history, and politics; cross-dressing and gender-bending; closed forms or open; stock characters wand plots or narrative fluidity. We will ask why in both China and Europe, opera repeatedly became the conflicted site of nationalist and modernizing aspirations, reiterations of tradition, and attempts at avant-gardism. When the presumed realism of film meets the extravagant hyperperformativity of opera, the encounter produces some extraordinary third kinds-media hybrids. Film repeatedly wrestled with the inherent histrionics of opera through the use of such devices as close-ups, camera angles, shot reverse shot, displacement of sound from sight, acousmatic sound, and trick photography. Such devices were generally meant to suture the supposed improbabilities of the operatic art form, incongruities often based on extravagant and transcendent relationships to realism. Such cinematic renderings of opera are highly revealing of fundamental faultlines in the genres themselves and revealing of the cultures that produced them.

This course examines each aspect of Pasolini's artistic production according to the most recent literary and cultural theories, including Gender Studies. We shall analyze his poetry (in particular "Le Ceneri di Gramsci" and "Poesie informa di rosa"), some of his novels ("Ragazzi di vita," "Una vita violenta," "Teorema," "Petrolio"), and his numerous essays on the relationship between standard Italian and dialects, semiotics and cinema, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary Western culture. We shall also discuss the following films: "Accattone," "La ricotta," "Edipo Re," "Teorema," and "Salo".

Focuses on cinematic responses by several leading film directors from East & Central Europe to a central event of 20th century history -- the Holocaust. Nazis began a cinematic documentation of WWII at its onset, positioning cameras in places of actual atrocities. Documentary footage produced was framed by hostile propagandistic schemes; contrary to this ‘method’, Holocaust feature films are all but a representation of Jewish genocide produced after the actual traumatic events. This class aims at discussing the challenge of representing the Jewish genocide which has often been defined as un-representable. Because of this challenge, Holocaust films raise questions of ethical responsibility for cinematic production & a search for relevant artistic means with which to engage post-traumatic representation. Therefore, among major tropes we will analyze voyeuristic evocation of death & suffering; a truthful representation of violence versus purported necessity of its cinematic aesthetization; intertwined notions of chance & hope as conditions of survival versus hagiographic representation of victims. The main goal is to grasp the potential of cinema for deepening our understanding of the Holocaust, the course simultaneously explores extensive & continuous cinematic production of the genre & its historical development in various European countries, to mention the impact of censorship by official ideologies in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, & Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as 'counter-terrorism' that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of 'post-truth' dominated by 'corporate-media,' 'fake news,' and 'fact-challenged' journalism. Taking this platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media - broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet - have aimed to 'counter' patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality.