Spring

Though the web was originally conceived as an online space for sharing hyperlinked documents, the modern Web browser has evolved into a creative coding playground capable of producing all manner of networked art and algorithmic compositions. In this course we'll learn JavaScript, the Web's defacto programming language. Throughout the quarter we'll experiment with various different Web APIs for creating generative and interactive Internet art including HTML5 video, Canvas (2D/3D animations) and Web Audio. We'll learn how to produce work that responds to various input sources (trackpad/mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, cameras, microphones) and how to fetch and incorporate data from external APIs elsewhere on the Internet.

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain—the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in non more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form? Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” a far too limiting in scope? But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? What has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts in particular cases?

Films presenting trans bodies or “psyches” have historically often othered these as "monstrous," and compelled a sense of the inevitable tragedy of living in sexual fluidity. To fully contemplate such expressions of horror, tragedy, or pity, the course will screen and discuss films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzick, 1983), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almadovar, 2011), Predestination (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014) but also considers films of the trans body made ostensibly more calculable, at least in terms of moral and ethical stability, such as Robocop, the Alien films of Ridley Scott, Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017), and the online choice map game Detroit Become Human. The course is dedicated foremost to rupturing binary thinking (as a form of nonage) and the critical theory that will ballast our readings includes selections from Haraway, Halberstam, Garber, Benschoff, Reese’s The Fourth Age, Schelde’s Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters, and Foucault’s Abnormal.

This course counts as a "Problems" course for GNSE majors.

This Gray Center sponsored research practicum is tied to a film project with documentary-maker and Mellon Collaborative Fellow Ric Burns about outsider artist Ralph Blakelock. America’s van Gogh, Blakelock created art far ahead of his time, went mad, and spent nearly twenty years in an asylum before emerging into the glare of flashbulbs as the most sought-after painter of the 1910s, only to end his life as victim of a con game. In between, he sojourned with the Sioux, hobnobbed with Gilded Age millionaires, channeled Longfellow and Mendelsohn in his art, struggled in the emergent New York “art world”, played vaudeville piano, and became one of the first major figures in modern celebrity-driven mass media. How best to capture this kaleidoscopic life and Blakelock’s dizzying art in a documentary is the creative challenge of the seminar. 

Our focus will be on Blakelock’s Ghost Dance/The Vision of Life. Art Institute conservators, assisted by chemistry department Professor Steven Sibener, will use scientific imaging to see inside the painting, whose provenance and context of production and reception need to be researched.

Participants will be assigned to specific topics based on area of expertise. The course should be of particular interest to students in DOVA, Art History, History, English, Psychology, Chemistry, Cinema Studies, and Anthropology.

This studio-based course explores the practice, conventions, and boundaries of contemporary media art and design. This can encompass areas as diverse as interactive installation, app design, and the Internet meme. Through projects and critical discussion, students engage with the problems and opportunities of digitally driven content creation. Fundamental elements of digital production are introduced, including basic properties of image, video, and the global network. Further topics as varied as--though not limited to--web production, digital fabrication, interfaces, the glitch, and gaming may be considered. Sections will vary based on the instructor's fields of expertise.

This course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This course may not double count for general education requirements and the Media Arts and Design minor. However, it is a great way for students to explore a potential interest in these areas.

This seminar will continue to focus on how to craft a production thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the production thesis, and help students finish their thesis projects.

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?

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 Hitchcock, Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, Sternberg, and Welles.

Many distinguished filmmakers have found inspiration in mystery novels written by women. In this course we shall read novels by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), Ruth Rendell (Tree of Hands, The Bridesmaid, Live Flesh), and, time permitting, Laura by Vera Caspary, Bunny Lake is Missing by Evelyn Piper, and Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong, and we shall analyze the films based on these novels, directed by such luminaries as Hitchcock. Chabrol, Caviani, Clément, Wenders, Almodóvar, Preminger, and others. Among topics of particular interest are: techniques of film adaptation; transnational dislocations from page to screen; the problematics of gender; and the transformations of "voice" understood both literally and mediatically.

A prolific director at MGM for over three decades, Vincente Minnelli made important contributions to some of the most celebrated entertainments in movie history. American critics in the 1940s praised his sophistication and lyrical humanism, and French and American auteurists of the 1950s and 60s regarded him as a sly satirist of bourgeois values. He eventually received an Oscar (for Gigi, 1958), and his work as a whole influenced such different later directors as Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese. This course will feature a cross-section of his films, concentrating on the three genres in which he specialized: musicals, domestic comedies, and melodramas. We will ask ourselves to what degree Minnelli was an auteur and to what degree a creature of the classic studio system. Whatever we decide, the course will deal not only with Minnelli but also with questions of genre, ideology, and the broader context of American culture in the three cities where Minnelli worked and lived: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition to participating in discussion of films and assigned readings, students will write an essay exam and a short analytic essay.