Cinema and Media Studies

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.

Permission from instructor is required for registration. Students will bid for entry to the class by emailing tcomerford@uchicago.edu, listing their year, major and previous production experience. Priority will be given to students who have previously completed the Intro to 16mm course, followed by CMS and DOVA majors, from graduate students to first-years. Students whose bids are accepted will be registered officially by the instructor at the first class meeting.

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.

Since the advent of photography, artists and commentators have likened the camera to an eye. Immediately, it became apparent that the eye in question was not quite human. The nature of the “creature” incorporating the camera eye has been the subject of speculation and disagreement ever since. In this class we will examine the relationship between human and machine perception, and the possibility of non-human filmic subjectivities. Epstein’s “the Bell and Howell is a metal brain,” Vertov’s “Kino-eye,” Benjamin’s optical unconscious, theories of the animistic camera, the possessed cameras of Jean Rouch and Maya Deren, Michael Snow’s mechanical landscape cinema will all be important points of reference. We will screen films by these filmmakers as well as surveillance, microscopic, and underwater films. This class is dedicated to interrogating and celebrating the manners in which the camera (and the microphone as well) allow us access to an expanded perception.

As recent dossiers, books, and essays devoted to labor in film studies and in literary studies suggest, contemporary anxiety over structural transformations in the sphere of work has prompted a renewed interest in the intersection between labor and aesthetic production. This seminar will explore-- through both historical and formal approaches--the encounter between the topic “labor/work” and the varieties of its poeticization in cultural expression across genres, media, and media platform—but particularly in cinema. Topics will include the aestheticization of labor; labor and gesture; automation and machine aesthetics; anti-work politics; commodity fetishism and industrial film; cultural evolutionism and ethnographic cinema; pictorial instructions and educational cinema; absorption and the process genre; craftsmanship and skill; affective and other forms of immaterial labor; the operational aesthetic; and leisure.

This seminar explores the emergence of film theory during the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Part of the aim is historiographic: to look at accounts of how and why something called Film Theory emerged in the wake of a set of intellectual, political, and institutional forces. The main focus of the seminar, however, will be to create an alternate approach to a set of questions that—as the recent resurgence of work on Film Theory show—have not gone away, and also to pick up a set of questions and topics that got left by the wayside. We’ll examine the idea that film theory arose in these years as a struggle over the legacy and meaning of modernism, especially an inheritance of modernist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the central ideas to be explored is that the line between theory and criticism was extremely porous in this period, and that film theory emerged out of a sustained dialogue with debates in art history. The seminar will trace three strands of film theory that laid claim to different modernist traditions: one exemplified by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried; a second by Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss; and a third by Peter Wollen and what has been called “Screen Theory.” Readings will position central texts from these strands of theory alongside their modernist influences, from Cubism to Duchamp to Dada to Benjamin to Brecht. The debates between major journals of the time, including Art Forum, October, and Screen, will be central to this history. Screenings will focus on work from Classical Hollywood, the rise of global new waves, and the American avant-garde.

The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. To achieve this, the course is divided into two units. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Beyond questions of fidelity, we will look at what it means to adapt particular stories at particular moments. How does an X-Men comic from 1982 adapt to meet the historical needs of its film adaptation in 2002? What do we mean when we say a particular adaptation is “good” or that another attempt “failed”? 

The works this course will consider are meant to challenge our understanding of what the art of comics can be. Comics as Medium intends to undertake the task of taking seriously—through close consideration of authorial and formal choices—that which is often considered unserious.

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 of Arts, Music, Drama (AMD) Courses.

In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as 'counter-terrorism' that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of 'post-truth' dominated by 'corporate-media,' 'fake news,' and 'fact-challenged' journalism. Taking this platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media - broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet - have aimed to 'counter' patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality.

This seminar explores what might be encountered under the categories of “Blackness” and “audio-visuality” with an emphasis on African-American and Black diasporic audio-visual culture. We will consider a range of studies of “Blackness” produced in English in the areas of African American and Black Studies, cinema and media studies, performance studies, art history, and visual studies.

This seminar undertakes a study of primarily post-World War II French and Belgian film and art movements in order to query the different status and conceptualization of the image and its relationship to history. We will begin our study with a brief look into pre-WWII of avant-garde art and film movements, and classic theories of the avant-garde. Turning our attention to late Surrealist practices, and the rise of neo-avant-garde movements such as Lettrism and the Situationist International, we will grapple with how these groups both understood the stakes of the image and history, as well as developed theoretical models to transform the agency of both within their political aesthetics. We will subsequently ask similar questions of the films and theories that eventually define the French New Wave before moving on to think about social documentary, politically militant image production, and collective film and art practices. 

Reading knowledge of French is not required, but may prove beneficial. Screenings are mandatory. With some possible exceptions, all films will be subtitled. Students enrolled through the FREN section will be required to complete all reading and writing in French