Cinema and Media Studies

This seminar will be devoted to close reading of Miriam Hansen’s path-breaking book, Cinema and Experience. As the most influential exponent of Critical Theory in cinema and media studies, we will discuss Hansen’s major contributions to the field, including her important reassessments of concepts of the public sphere and experience, modernity and mass culture, aesthetics and politics, the play-form of second nature, utopia and counter-utopia, and alternative accounts of spectatorship among others. We will also read in parallel and discuss the major texts of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer that are the basis of her unique reconstruction of Critical Theory as a philosophy of cinema, photography, and visual culture.

This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Students are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques focus on the handheld camera versus tripod, interviewing and microphone placement, and lighting for the interview. Postproduction covers editing techniques and distribution strategies. Students then screen final projects in a public space.

This production-based class will explore the possibilities and limits of capturing the world with imaging approaches that go beyond the conventional camera. What new and experimental image-based artworks can be created with technologies such as laser scanning, structured light projection, time of flight cameras, photogrammetry, stereography, motion capture, sensor augmented cameras or light field photography? This hands-on course welcomes students with production experience while being designed to keep established tools and commercial practices off-kilter and constantly in question.

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.

Media theory frequently focuses on issues of technology as opposed to, or at the cost of, politics and culture. This course reorients attention to the intersection of media and cultural theory. We begin by reviewing key media theories from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School. Following a historical introduction, we explore the contemporary field of cultural media theory as it has unfolded in both the humanities and the social sciences. Students will think through how the sites of race, class, gender, and sexuality might frame and always already influence the ways that we think of media — from the broadcast media of Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry that included radio, film, and television to contemporary pointcasting that is made up of digital and networked technologies. Alongside readings in an expanded media theory, we will engage artistic and cultural works, including literature, films, television serials, smart phone apps, video games, social media, and algorithms. We also explore methodological differences in media studies between the humanities and the social sciences.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of direct cinema, cinéma vérité, the essay, ethnographic film, the diary, historical and biographical film, agitprop/activist forms, and guerilla television will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the documentary genre, such as the ethics and politics of representation and the shifting lines between documentary fact and fiction, will be explored. Pre-production strategies and production techniques will be taught, including the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will be expected to purchase a portable FireWire. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are encouraged to take Documentary Production II to complete their work.

This multilevel studio will investigate minimalist strategies in artists’ film and video from the late 1960s to the present day.  Emphasis will be placed on works made with limited means and/or with “amateur” formats such as Super-8 and 16mm film, camcorders, Flip cameras, SLR video, and iPhone or iPad. Our aim is to imagine how to produce complex results from economical means. Important texts will be paired with in class discussion of works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Kurt Kren, Jack Goldstein, Larry Gottheim, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, John Baldessari, Morgan Fisher, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, Sam Taylor-Wood, and others.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this class 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." Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short "sketches" of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.

This course will introduce students to Latin American film studies through an assessment of its most critically celebrated period of radical filmmaking. The New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) of the late 1950s–70s generated unprecedented international enthusiasm for Latin American film production. The filmmakers of this loosely designated movement were defining themselves in relation to global realist film traditions like Italian Neorealism and Griersonian documentary, in relation to—mostly failed—experiments in building Hollywood-style national film industries, and in relation to regional discourses of underdevelopment and mestizaje. Since the late 1990s, a reassessment of the legacy of the NLAC has been taking shape as scholars have begun to interrogate its canonical status in the face of a changed political climate. In the sphere of filmmaking, contemporary Latin American new wave cinemas are also grappling with that legacy—sometimes disavowing it, sometimes appropriating it. We will situate the NLAC in its historical context, survey its formal achievements and political aspirations, assess its legacy, and take stock of the ways and the reasons that it haunts contemporary production.

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.