Spring

Ozu Yasujiro is widely regarded as one of the finest film-makers in the history of the medium. This course studies every film Ozu made during the later part of his career. Half of the films will be 35mm prints shown as part of a series at DOC films on Sunday nights, the rest will be class screenings. After surveying Ozu's early career we move through the Occupation-era films that dented and then reestablished Ozu's reputation to the rigorous "late style" of Ozu's final films, made when he was one of the most prestigious filmmakers in Japan and the Japanese film industry was at the height of its commercial success. Topics covered in the course include the wartime reinvention of Japanese cinema, the overt connection between Ozu's films and social change in postwar Japan, the shifts in the film industry of which these films were a part, the theory and practice of Ozu the auteur, and the peculiar understanding of the film medium that develops in Ozu's films.

From the earliest days of filmmaking in China, a succession of iconic women provided focal points for questions of cultural identity, modernity, and national liberation.  This course surveys changing meanings associated with the figure of woman -- as subject, performer, and author -- in classics of Shanghai and Hong Kong cinema, and in the work of recent filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Stanley Kwan, Li Shaohong, Li Yu, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Nuanxin, and Zhang Yimou.  Throughout, we take into account aesthetic and social contexts of production and reception, examining the films alongside the related media of fiction, the illustrated periodical press, theatre, and television. 

This doctoral seminar will review previous, current – and perhaps future – conceptions of the ontology of the moving image: its nature and characteristics and its relation as a form of representation to the world.  The speculations of Andre Bazin will form a key reference, but the challenge issued by both the pre-history of cinema and the emergence of new digital media will allow us to extend and question Bazin beyond the era of classical cinema. The role of movement, projection and photography as aspects of the moving image medium will be discussed both in terms of their affects and their claims to reference.  Theorists such as Metz, Kracauer, Deleuze, Manovich, Rodowick, and others will be explored along with film and video-makers such as Frampton, Godard and Eisenstein.

This seminar will look at the history of editing from early attempts at multi-shot sequencing to self-conscious experiments in "intellectual montage;" at editing techniques ranging from cross-cutting to CGI sequences; and at the variety of montage theories from Eisenstein and Pudovkin to Bazin. We will test Eisenstein's hypothesis about biological foundations of temporality in art; connect dynamic patterns of film editing to Daniel Stern's study The Present Moment;link temporal contours of cutting to theories of gendered narratology. 

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

Knowledge of Chinese not required. The distinctive historical situation of Shanghai has stimulated and haunted the imaginations of Chinese filmmakers throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. In this course we track the multiform significance of Shanghai as location, subject, and the artistic and commercial center of film production, as a site, variously, for experiment, self-reflection, dislocation, yearning, loss, and apotheosis.  We explore the lively relationships between cinema and the diverse urban media proliferating in this multinational “treaty port” city, with special attention to developments in photography, lithography, the illustrated periodical press, serialized fiction, advertising, architecture, design, popular music, theatre, the recording industry, radio, and new media.  Interconnections among urban films from other cinema cultures will be discussed.  Films include Crossroads, Street Angel, Myriads of Lights, The City that Never Sleeps, A Spring River Flows East, and Suzhou River, among others. 

PQ: Consent of instructor. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. This course may not be counted toward distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a free-elective credit.

Consent of faculty adviser and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. This course may be used to satisfy distribution requirements for Cinema and Media Studies concentrators.

Against the background of Hollywood’s changing attitudes toward Hitler’s Germany, this course will explore the links between fascism, emigration and film through the perspective of the refugee community in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. Retracing one major escape route from Central Europe to America, we will examine filmic and literary attempts to capture the experience of a displaced person, endangered, defenseless and unwelcome everywhere. The social and professional situation as well as the political activities of Hollywood's approximately eight hundred, mainly Jewish European refugees will be studied along with a discussion of the extent of the film exiles’ impact on American filmmaking and politics during this period. We will consider impressions of short and long-term returnees to Germany after the war and attempt to clarify the controversial issue of this mass migration’s artistic, political and intellectual legacy in Hollywood.

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.