2003-2004

Imaging plays a central role in biomedical research and practice. This role is likely to grow in the future as seen by the recent creation of the new National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering within the National Institutes of Health. This course explores technical, historical, artistic, and cultural aspects of imaging from the earliest attempts to enhance and capture visual stimuli through the medical imaging revolution of the twentieth century. Topics include the development of early optical instruments (e.g., microscopes, telescopes); the first recording of photographic images; the emergence of motion pictures; the development of image-transmission technologies (e.g., offset printing, television, the Internet); and the invention of means to visualize the invisible within the body through the use of X-rays, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound.

Considers the problem of how popular films in the US, Europe, and Asia have represented the conventional religions' relation to modernity: the idea of film practices ("youth culture") as constituting a secular religion alternative or antagonistic to the conventional religions and the recuperation and transformation of conventional religiosity in modernist, especially patriotic and science-fiction films as a national theology ("civil religion"). One to two films per week will be shown. Requirement: One 10-page paper, written in two stages.

The course will concentrate on comparative analyses of the screen types known as the "Latin Lover" and the "Tough Guy," with particular attention given to Italian, Italian-American, and mainstream American cinema. Included will be Valentino, Mastroianni, De Niro, Keitel, and Eastwood. How are the normative assumptions regarding masculine types that underly the figures of the "latin lover" and the "tough guy" questioned, fractured, and "queered" in the films we shall study? How do ethnic and cultural attitudes shape screen masculinities, and what might comparisons between Italian and American male types reveal about the nations and cultures in question?

In light of aboriginal peoples producing their own ethnography and media, there is a need to re-examine ethnographic and documentary film practice. We will survey expositions and fairs, museum displays, the development of visual anthropology, feature and documentary films, collaboration between ethnographer and filmmaker and filmmaker and subject, arriving at the movement where aboriginal peoples create their own documents. This re-contextualization demands transforming traditional disciplinary boundaries to include the collecting and artifact industry, exhibition, museology, travel, and counter-media. The organizing principle for the course will be my twenty years of film and video work with the ,Namgis First Nation of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiut'l) Nation of British Columbia.

For description, see Art History

This course examines major texts in film theory from Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Muensterberg in the 1910s through Andre 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 Muensterberg, 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.

Weekly screenings and some readings in Japanese.

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

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.

Consent of faculty adviser and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. This course may be used to satisfy distribution requirements for Cinema and Media Studies concentrators.