Spring

This class combines three emerging ways of looking at cinema: a continuously growing barrage of AI-based algorithms that seek to unlock data latent in images; existing films and digital archives of moving image material; and tools and programming environments oriented towards the construction of new moving-image works, viewing situations and logics. At a time when we are perhaps further away from the stable objects of cinema than we have ever been, when digital streaming repackages and recomposes film in front of our very eyes, or when virtual, augmented and mixed realities embed and dissolve cinema's frames in new and virtual spaces, what new positive opportunities for scholarship and creation can we find?

This class is open to graduate students regardless of their production, coding, film-making experience. If you have any curiosity around the potentials and mechanisms of computers seeing us, seeing our film and video, helping navigate and bootstrap new digital humanities approaches or curiosities that shade quantitative or algorithmic, join us in this class — there's important work to be started here.

The Image is a concept that returns and varies across Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical works. In this seminar, we will work through Deleuze’s characterization of the Image in its varying forms—image of thought, thought without image, movement-image, time-image, the visible and the expressible, Idea and percept, and sensation and figure, among others. Of special concern will be Deleuze’s arguments concerning the relation of philosophy to art. Readings will include selections from Proust and Signs, Difference and Repetition, Foucault, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Logic of Sensation, What is Philosophy?, and perhaps other texts. Reading knowledge of French is recommended but not required.

Two of the most basic concepts at work in both filmmaking and film scholarship are the camera and the shot, yet each term resists easy definition. The shot is often defined in terms of the camera, and in terms of an imagined moment of “shooting.” The camera, is perhaps best described by Ed Branigan a “a logic of reading”: a kind of fiction we create to identify and to give meaning to changes in cinematic framing (i.e., “the camera tracks left to reveal…”). While both terms try to describe material realities, both also founder on logical grounds and as descriptions of our experience. We are all familiar with single shot films that neither operate by the same principles, nor create the same effect. Arrival of a train at La Ciotat is not Empire.

This course hopes to interrogate the specificities of the cinematic camera by paring the variables down to single-shot films. We will examine the idea of the cinematic dispositif or “apparatus” and ask whether there is such a thing as the camera rather than a multiplicity of  cameras. We will address the persistence of animism in film theory and criticism, attempts to define the quiddity of the filmed image, analogies between human and creaturely perception, machine vision, forms and logics of picturing and pictorial organization. We will also take the opportunity to examine acoustic analogs (the microphone, the recording) in order to help us understand the logics and the fallacies at work in our basic analytic concepts. Our film viewing will concentrate upon very early cinema (the Lumières, Edison, etc.) and on the avant-garde (Warhol, Snow, Gottheim, Jacobs, Gehr, etc.). Along the way, we will examine some mainstream films like Rope and Russian Ark, or Birdman.

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the 1960s to the 2000s. The continued development of film style and form over this period — one of seismic changes in audio-visual aesthetics — will be one of the primary themes of the course. Additionally, lectures and discussions will wrestle with the rise of global film cultures, technological innovations and their effects on style (such as post-magnetic sound, and visual effects techniques), major international directors and the solidification of auteurism as both a commercial and aesthetic imperative, the increasing internationalization of Hollywood, and post-1970s genre reorientation elevating horror, science-fiction, and other genres to the highest levels of mainstream respectability, critical appraisal, and/or commercial success. Screenings are mandatory and include work by filmmakers including Pedro Almodovar, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Federico Fellini, Hollis Frampton, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cristian Mungiu, and more, in addition to a selection of music videos.

This course explores the political documentary film, its intersection with historical and cultural events, and its opposition to Hollywood and traditional media. We will examine various documentary modes of production, from films with a social message, to advocacy and activist film, to counter-media and agit- prop. We will also consider the relationship between the filmmaker, film subject and audience, and how political documentaries are disseminated and, most importantly, part of political struggle.

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 examine influential writings on photography, film, and film narrative published in the post- war period in the context of semiology, structuralism, and narratology. We will examine how questions of form, structure, and narrative in film and photography are addressed by critics writing from the end of World War II until the early seventies, especially in France and Italy. In what ways can the image be considered a sign? How do images come to have meaning in a denotative or connotative sense? What are the principal codes organizing images as narrative media and how do spectators recognise those codes? Readings will include work by Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Jean Mitry, Noël Burch, Raymond Bellour, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and David Bordwell, among others.

Since Grierson’s definition of the documentary as “creative treatment of actuality,” critics have been struggling to establish distinctions between documentary and fiction. Furthermore, the critical discourse has been constantly challenged by new artistic meditations of reality and its representation, and works blurring the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. Additionally, this dualism is complicated by the difficult question of truth telling. Cinema has a long and winding history of non-fiction: from staged or dramatized actualities at its beginning, via docudrama, fake documentaries and mockumentary, to trends in recent documentaries that incorporate reenactment and animation. Since the mid-1990s the “documentary turn in contemporary art” has seen more and more artists experimenting with documentary modes through which they are questioning the mediations by which facts/documents acquire their facticity.

In this course we explore the history of queer and transgender cinema and media in an effort to situate new developments in queer and trans cinema and media making. We will consider relevant theories about gender and sexuality and their implications for our categories of film and media analysis.

Open only to upper-year students who have declared a major in Cinema and Media Studies, the ‘Advanced Seminar’ functions as a capstone course. It will allow students the opportunity to explore in more depth key disciplinary and methodological questions related to the study of cinema and media. Particular topics will be determined by the individual faculty instructor, and will vary from the Autumn to Spring Quarters and from instructor to instructor.

Spring 2025 Description: Materiality has become a hallmark of contemporary research into film and media. Siobhan Angus spoke for this new orientation when she argues in Camera Geologica (2024) that “thinking materially alongside representation—considering photographs as both objects and images—yields new insights into the history of photography and environmental change.” But have we sufficiently interrogated the popular notion of media materiality as a critical perspective and research methodology? What are we doing when we attempt to engage and investigate media from the perspective of its materiality? This reading-intensive seminar unpacks the materialist turn in film, media, and cultural studies through polemical engagement with secondary literature and methodology debates. While designed to service the needs of CMS majors, PhD and MAPH students are welcome to register for or audit the course.