This laboratory seminar is devoted to exploring the texts of Franz Kafka through the lens of performance. In addition to weekly scenic experiments and extensive critical readings (on Kafka as well as performance theory) we will explore the rich history of adapting Kafka in film, theater, puppetry, opera, and performance.
Since 2000, in the United States alone, there have been over a hundred films and more than two dozen television series inspired by comics as source material. With each installment of Marvel’s Avengers franchise continuing to claim spots atop box office records, with each ensemble cast film naturally splintering into a series of stand-alone character vehicles, with regenerating “reboots” occurring only years after originals, the popular appeal of adapting comics—to both studios and general audiences—seems unlikely to dissipate anytime soon. However, it is precisely the form’s popularity that tends to stymie the critical discourses. After all, if it is popular it can hardly be worthy of serious study, right? But what does that leave us with? What do we really understand about the marriage of comics and film, comics and art? In a climate in which the borders differentiating media continue to collapse into something now referred to as “transmedia,” what does it actually mean for us to move between mediums—particularly mediums that raise familiar issues of representation, temporality, and narrative? The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. To achieve this, the course is divided into two units. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Beyond questions of fidelity, we will look at what it means to adapt particular stories at particular moments. How does an X-Men comic from 1982 adapt to meet the historical needs of its film adaptation in 2002? What do we mean when we say a particular adaptation is “good” or that another attempt “failed”? The works this course will consider are meant to challenge our understanding of what the art of comics can be. Comics as Medium intends to undertake the task of taking seriously—through close consideration of authorial and formal choices—that which is often considered unserious.
The ancient and multivalent image of the underground has crystallized over the last two centuries to denote sites of disaffection from-and strategies of resistance to-dominant social, political and cultural systems. We will trace the development of this metaphor from the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s and the French Resistance during World War II to the Weather Underground in the 1960s-1970s, while also considering it as a literary and artistic concept, from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Ellison's Invisible Man to Chris Marker's film La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Alongside with such literary and cinematic tales, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Guy Debord, this course investigates how countercultural spaces become-or fail to become-sites of political resistance, and also how dissenting ideologies give rise to countercultural spaces. We ask about the relation between social deviance (the failure to meet social norms, whether willingly or unwittingly) and political resistance, especially in the conditions of late capitalism and neo-colonialism, when countercultural literature, film and music (rock, punk, hip-hop, DIY aesthetics etc.) get absorbed into-and coopted by-the hegemonic socio-economic system. In closing we will also consider contemporary forms of dissidence-from Pussy Riot to Black Lives Matter-that rely both on the vulnerability of individual bodies and global communication networks.
This seminar explores what might be encountered under the categories of “Blackness” and “audio-visuality” with an emphasis on African-American and Black diasporic audio-visual culture. We will consider a range of studies of “Blackness” produced in English in the areas of African American and Black Studies, cinema and media studies, performance studies, art history, and visual studies.
This seminar explores the emergence of film theory during the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Part of the aim is historiographic: to look at accounts of how and why something called Film Theory emerged in the wake of a set of intellectual, political, and institutional forces. The main focus of the seminar, however, will be to create an alternate approach to a set of questions that—as the recent resurgence of work on Film Theory show—have not gone away, and also to pick up a set of questions and topics that got left by the wayside. We’ll examine the idea that film theory arose in these years as a struggle over the legacy and meaning of modernism, especially an inheritance of modernist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the central ideas to be explored is that the line between theory and criticism was extremely porous in this period, and that film theory emerged out of a sustained dialogue with debates in art history. The seminar will trace three strands of film theory that laid claim to different modernist traditions: one exemplified by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried; a second by Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss; and a third by Peter Wollen and what has been called “Screen Theory.” Readings will position central texts from these strands of theory alongside their modernist influences, from Cubism to Duchamp to Dada to Benjamin to Brecht. The debates between major journals of the time, including Art Forum, October, and Screen, will be central to this history. Screenings will focus on work from Classical Hollywood, the rise of global new waves, and the American avant-garde.
This seminar explores the emergence of film theory during the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Part of the aim is historiographic: to look at accounts of how and why something called Film Theory emerged in the wake of a set of intellectual, political, and institutional forces. The main focus of the seminar, however, will be to create an alternate approach to a set of questions that—as the recent resurgence of work on Film Theory show—have not gone away, and also to pick up a set of questions and topics that got left by the wayside. We’ll examine the idea that film theory arose in these years as a struggle over the legacy and meaning of modernism, especially an inheritance of modernist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the central ideas to be explored is that the line between theory and criticism was extremely porous in this period, and that film theory emerged out of a sustained dialogue with debates in art history. The seminar will trace three strands of film theory that laid claim to different modernist traditions: one exemplified by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried; a second by Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss; and a third by Peter Wollen and what has been called “Screen Theory.” Readings will position central texts from these strands of theory alongside their modernist influences, from Cubism to Duchamp to Dada to Benjamin to Brecht. The debates between major journals of the time, including Art Forum, October, and Screen, will be central to this history. Screenings will focus on work from Classical Hollywood, the rise of global new waves, and the American avant-garde.
The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. To achieve this, the course is divided into two units. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Beyond questions of fidelity, we will look at what it means to adapt particular stories at particular moments. How does an X-Men comic from 1982 adapt to meet the historical needs of its film adaptation in 2002? What do we mean when we say a particular adaptation is “good” or that another attempt “failed”?
The works this course will consider are meant to challenge our understanding of what the art of comics can be. Comics as Medium intends to undertake the task of taking seriously—through close consideration of authorial and formal choices—that which is often considered unserious.
This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.
Attendance in first class is mandatory to confirm enrollment. Open only to non-CMS majors; may not count towards CMS major requirements. For non-majors, any CMST 14400 through 14599 course meets the general education requirement of Arts, Music, Drama (AMD) Courses.
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.
This seminar explores what might be encountered under the categories of “Blackness” and “audio-visuality” with an emphasis on African-American and Black diasporic audio-visual culture. We will consider a range of studies of “Blackness” produced in English in the areas of African American and Black Studies, cinema and media studies, performance studies, art history, and visual studies.
