CMST

In this graduate seminar we will investigate theories and historiographic methodologies of approaching problems of evidence in film history, with a particular focus on approaches to nonextant film, film fragments, unidentified film, and other “mysteries” of film history. Some of these problems are about gaps: how has film history grappled with the absence and instability of the film artifact? Others, especially in a newly digital world, involve abundance: how can film history and historiography navigate the polyvalences of meaning brought about by an ever-expanding archive? This course will combine theoretical readings, analyses of case studies, and students’ own research. Topics to be covered include the use of extrafilmic evidence and primary paracinematic evidence, fiction and speculative approaches to history, theories of evidence, and archival theories and practices. We’ll also focus on the possibilities and limits of various historiographic methodologies, touching on the use of oral history, biographic research, and official and unofficial discourses. Cases will be drawn from the silent era to contemporary cinema, and from a range of film practices including avant-garde, Classical Hollywood, African American, European art cinema, and others.

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.

SFF Asia centers on science fiction and fantasy cinema and media in Asia. Through an exploration of key films, media franchises, and subgenres, the course will delve into genre criticism, sf theory, and the history of moving image technologies, to consider what is meant by “sff” and “Asia” at different places and times. Thus, while structured around “sff in Asia,” the course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema and media as distributed, polycentric, transnational processes.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the course will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots, and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies.

This series of workshops—comprised of approximately 10 meetings—will provide support for students working on production theses across the entire academic year. It is taught by a production faculty member and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to systematically guide students through the necessary steps in the realization of a film project from pre-production to production to post-production.

This series of workshops — comprised of approximately 10 meetings — will provide support for thesis writers across the entire academic year. It is taught by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to guide students through the process of thesis writing from developing a research question to determining the most appropriate research method for its exploration to integrating suitable theoretical insights to writing compellingly about media objects to the nuts and bolts of exposition.

This course provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on how human minds and brains engage with and respond to film and media. Using such interdisciplinary approaches as neuroscience, experimental psychology, linguistics, analytical philosophy, film theory, and cognitive film studies, we will try to understand why we like to watch movies; how we process what we see and hear on the screen; why some movies attract more than others; how identity, politics, and culture may affect the viewer response; and what the nature of the mind’s engagement with art might be.

This class will introduce a toolkit for thinking about and researching media, mediation, and new media cultures. We will begin with questions of technology. These will include the tension between technological determinism and the social construction of technology, as well as methods for investigating the historical evolution of media technologies. To explore how power operates within and through media, we will engage concepts and theoretical frameworks including algorithmic bias, transmedia, fan studies, platform studies, and media infrastructures. Students will develop critical and aesthetic perspectives on digital media, with special attention to games, participatory media, and code.
 

The films of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman are among the most powerful, complicated, and philosophically sophisticated portrayals of moral and religious and failed moral and religious life in the twentieth century. Bergman is especially concerned with crisis experiences and with related emotional states like anguish, alienation, guilt, despair, loneliness, shame, abandonment, conversion, and the mystery of death. We will watch and discuss eight of his most important films in this course with such issues in mind: Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Winter Light (1963), Persona (1966), Shame (1968), Cries and Whispers (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978), Fanny and Alexander (1982). (A)
 

Focusing on experimental strategies at a crucial moment in an emerging medium, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for Augmented Reality (AR). By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical and sonic experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new tactics and interactive logics for layering technology onto real spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging AR “canon” that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative works. Uniquely for this quarter we will be using a particularly stimulating and challenging space for our explorations — the Untidy Objects “sculpture” located south of Logan center. This carefully maintained, rewilded space will ultimately provide our canvas, our dataset and our classroom.