Cinema and Media Studies

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 course will look at our current relationship with technologies of mass data collection from both the inside and the outside. From the inside: students will be given the opportunity to sharpen their understanding of the possibilities and limits of surveillance by testing contemporary algorithms against datasets of their own design and curation. From the outside: we’ll ask how cultural frameworks have driven these technological and social shifts, conditioned our responses to them, or directed us away from their inner mechanisms. In doing so, this experimental course seeks to close the critical and cultural distance between technical, industrial and commercial advances in artificial intelligence, the scientific writings behind this field, and conceptions and uses of data traditionally available to the arts and humanities. 

Undergraduate students may enroll with permission of instructor. 

This course examines the work of one of the most significant directors working in France today. From the 1960s to the present day, Varda's films have been crucial to the development of new film practices: both in the past—as with the birth of the French New Wave Cinema—and in the present by exploring new forms of visual narration and by working with moving images in gallery spaces.

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 in the arts.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed include works by Capra, Dash, Deren, Keaton, Hitchcock,  Kubrick, Riggs and Sirk.

How would you describe your family? Who do you count as its members? Nuclear family, extended family, socialist commune, totemic kinship—the list goes on. Despite the etymological affinity, it turns out that little about the family is familiar. From its inception, cinema has participated in the project of imagining different ways of constructing family life. Sundry families have been rendered on screen, soliciting our physical departure from the confine of domiciles into the movie theater where they appear. This is particularly true and prominent in contemporary films produced across East Asian societies and diasporic communities—places that are often perceived to foreground familial connection as the primary source of identity. Indeed, while the ideological ordering of these regimes frequently presumes a standard model of the family life for which they can legislate, families on the ground hardly cohere to any single structure. From feature film to documentary; from home video to animation—all the films we will study in this class pivot around the negotiation between conformity and rebellion, predictability and strangeness, the urge to integrate and the force of diffusion behind family formation. In them, the idea and ideal of the family have routinely been pursued, interrogated, destroyed, and, occasionally, rebuilt. Approaching East Asian cinemas (in the plural) through the prism of the family, this course seeks to address the following questions: How has the family as a figure informed the formulation of certain filmmaking traditions? How can we rethink existing accounts of East Asian film history through the family as a figure? In what ways can the culturo-historical conditions of these societies help us think about their screen families? And, conversely, what possibilities of family life does cinematic imagination open up? Through what narrative and stylistic devices have families been rendered on screen?

The course offers panoramic views as well as close-ups of cinematic landscapes of East Asia and Southeast Asia. We will cover a variety of films—including animation and documentary—from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with a focus on site-specific works and trans-regional co-productions, circulations, and exchanges. Combining critical readings with truly close analyses of films, this course seeks to develop: (1) solid understandings of cinema’s peculiar and intricate relations to space and time; (2) conversations between cinema and other art forms, such as photography, painting, and calligraphy; (3) methods and skills of conducting film analysis. Proficiency in East Asian languages is not required.

This class sets out to complicate French sociologist Max Weber’s famous notion of modernity as the “disenchantment of the world” by reconstructing and re-evaluating what we will call the revelationist tradition in film theory and practice, which is predicated upon cinema’s alleged utopian potential for revealing the ineffable, irrational, invisible, and unrepresentable aspects of reality. As simultaneously art and technology, cinema seems to offer, to many filmmakers and theorists, the potential for the re-enchantment of modernity by transforming the way we sense, perceive, and understand the world. This course will offer a historical survey of this tradition, study the contexts of its emergence and development, and speculate on its implications for contemporary film theory. To do so, we will take up seriously theoretical concepts and aesthetic strategies such as revelationism, vibration, synaesthesia, abstraction, and ecstasy, which are the results of the interactions between the cinematic imagination, modern science, and various occult/esoteric/mystical traditions. Our inquiry will trace a trajectory from the formation of revelationist film theory during the silent period, to the American “visionary” avant-garde, to “transcendental” styles in modernist film, and to contemporary documentary and horror cinema. 

Readings will consist of historical film theory and criticism as well as secondary texts from other disciplines which will help illuminate their intellectual context. Films are not considered as mere illustrations of the readings but as equally important primary materials for the class’s discussion, and close formal analyses of films are integral to the objective of the course. No previous knowledge of film theory or film history is required, but students will find a preliminary acquaintance with the process and vocabulary of film analysis advantageous. 

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.

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