Spring

COVA 101, 102, or consent of instructor. A camera and light meter are required. Photography affords a relatively simple and accessible means for making pictures. Through demonstration, students are introduced to technical procedures and basic skills, and begin to establish criteria for artistic expression. Possibilities and limitations inherent in the medium are topics of classroom discussion. Class sessions and field trips to local exhibitions investigate the contemporary photograph in relation to its historical and social context. Course work culminates in a portfolio of works exemplary of the student's understanding of the medium. Lab fee $40.

From the the veterans of the 10s (Maurice Tourneur, Louis Gasnier) until the "visiting auteurs" of the 70s (Louis Malle), we will study the difficult integration of the French filmmakers in the United States. We will mostly focus on the period of Word War II, with the exile of some leading artists of the thirties (Ren_ Clair, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Max Ophuls), in order to analyse how these filmmakers follow an "European dream" within the limits of the American industry.

Advanced standing Introduction to the poetics and politics of some of the major works of postwar German Cinema, including films by Wolfgang Staudte, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Michael Verhoeven, and Monika Treut. In English. All films with English subtitles.

This research seminar seeks to accomplish two goals: to familiarize students with basic issues associated with the writing of history, especially the history of the cinema, and to serve as a practical introduction to the archival resources and methods of film-historical research. Toward the latter end the class will engage in a collaborative research project, which we will carry out during the quarter. During this process we will discuss how archives are produced and structured, and how they may be used in familiar and unfamiliar ways. Likewise, we will discuss and evaluate different approaches to the writing of film history. In addition to texts devoted to film history by Bazin, Gomery and Allen, Buscombe, Comolli, Bordwell, Altman, Crafton, and Gunning, we will look at broader developments in the writing of history, focusing, in part, on the post-Annales schools of history.

Undergraduates may register only with consent of the instructor The course examines relations between the city, cinematic apparatus, and affects of modernity in Asian cinemas. Hyperbole, displacement, commodity, anonymity, loss, fetish, and speed are among the tropes of urban life that we examine within, and as a product of, Asian cinemas of the modern. Wartime Shanghai, imperial Tokyo, mid-century Bombay, late-century Hong-Kong --we examine the familiar and foreign Asian city as site of cinematic production and consumption in the local, national, and global contexts of various Asian cinemas.

Consent of instructor

This course will examine the contribution of Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century and its principal theatre theorist, to the practice and theory of theatre and cinema. We will pay particular attention to the relationships between theory and practice in Brecht's own work so as to clarify the use and significance of terms that are both concepts and techniques - epic theatre, Verfremdung, gest, historicizing, refunctioning the apparatus, and teh formation of the critical audience - and go on to consider the influence (and refunctioning) of Brechtian theory and practice in the more recent work of playwrights (Heiner MŸller, Peter Weiss,RW Fassbinder, Edward Bond, Athol Fugard, ...), film-makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, Fassbinder, Djibril Diop Mambety ...), and cultural theorists (Barthes, Adorno, ...)

A survey of the first wave of video art in the U.S. We will be screening and discussing the first ten years of video produced by artists and activists, primarily on the east coast and in California, including Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin and Top Value Television. Because of relatively inexpensive equipment and inherently synced sound, video democratized the production of moving images, allowing artists to challenge imagined limits of broadcast television and encultured gender representations. Much of the work we will be looking at in this new medium was made as an auxillary activity by artists already working in sculpture, conceptual art, and performance. We will analyze the work as it relates both to this art context and to the socio-political climate of the seventies.

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.