An introduction to postcolonial theory; its rise in the Anglophone academy; overlaps with critical race studies, feminist theory, indigenous studies. I will conclude with the recent planetary turn in postcolonial studies.
The interest of postwar North American experimental filmmakers in philosophy is well-known, for example Stan Brakhage’s interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maya Deren’s appeals to Henri Bergson, or Hollis Frampton’s writings on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. In this seminar, we will closely watch a selection of important experimental films accompanied by filmmakers’ writings and associated texts by philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and others. Our central question will be: how do experimental filmmakers practice philosophy in their creative work?
Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this course will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct, and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection, and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative "VR cinema."
This course will allow students to continue working on projects begun in the Intro to 16mm Production course (or developing a new small-scale project), in addition to developing skills with the following: sophisticated approaches to cinematography (comparative and reflective light metering, color negative exposure); varying workflows for post-production editing (analog and digital); and sound recording and design. Students will meet as a group for lectures, technical demonstrations and a shooting workshop. Course meeting time will also be set aside for individual conferences with the instructor to address project development and completion. Students should expect to budget between 120.00-500.00 for their filmstock and processing costs, depending on the project. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Instructor permission required.
This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the late 1950s through the 1990s. We will focus on New Cinemas in France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. We will pay special attention to experimental stylistic developments, women directors, and well-known auteurs. After the New Cinema era we will examine various developments in world cinema, including the rise of Bollywood, East Asian film cultures, and other movements.
This course proposes an overview of Francophone cinema of the last decade. It will reflect the diversity and the richness of contemporary auteur cinema through various genres and genre-defying works. We will screen a selection of recent internationally acclaimed movies from renowned filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Leos Carax, as well as from a new generation of filmmakers such as Céline Sciamma, Ladj Ly, or Mati Diop. We will also discuss the controversy surrounding the film Cuties (Mignonnes) by Maïmouna Doucouré.
There is generally a division in cinema and media studies between filmmakers on the one hand and critics and theorists on the other: the first group makes the films that the other groups write about. In this seminar, we’ll look at filmmakers who were also critics and theorists, who wrote about other films and filmmakers, and, most of all, about their own work. We’ll thus examine films by a number of key filmmakers in light of what they said they were trying to make, and their ideas of what their medium is, using the dissonance between idea and result to take a fresh look basic terms and concepts in film studies: montage, perception, narrative, genre, authorship, realism, race, gender, documentary, and so on.
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.
This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works.
All films are horror films. Film’s spectrality had been a given since the earliest days of its existence, as it exists as the captured shadows of people and things no longer present. Joining photographs, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph, film immediately presented itself as a kind of sense-memory that could present the traces of those not present, and even, traces of the dead. Nipper’s perch on the coffin of his owner, reacting to his very live voice, sets the stage for Edison to announce the kinetograph, which “would do for the eye what the phonograph had done for the ear.” That is, it would bring us into the uncanny presence of a world beyond the reach of our unaided senses. In this context, horror would seem to lay claim to being a “cine-genre,” as defined by Pitorofsky – a genre that deals with fundamental properties of the medium. Throughout its history, and even its pre-history horror films have mediated our encounters with the non-human: technology, the dead, the world of creatures, and our bodies, to the extent that they do not belong to us. Terror, disgust, shock, trauma, and the uncanny all find their expression in horror films, and this course aims to explore how the horror film has explored the uncanny, animism, “primitive” thought, evil, the mind and the body’s relationship to technology, climate change, and the world considered as excluding humans. As Benjamin once said, “It is a different nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye.”
• One in-person seminar weekly + one in-person screening weekly
