Spring

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

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.

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.

COVA 101 or 102, and 240 or 241, or consent of instructor. Throughout the quarter, students concentrate on a set of issues and ideas that expand upon their experience and knowledge, and that have particular relevance to them. All course work is directed towards the production of a cohesive body of either color or black-and-white photographs. An investigation of contemporary and historic photographic issues informs the students' photographic practice and includes visits to local exhibitions, critical readings, darkroom techniques, and class and individual critiques. Lab fee $40.

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.

This course will trace relations between motion pictures and traditions of magic, both as a theatrical entertainment and as a belief system. The invention of cinema's roots in the magic lantern and other "philosophical toys" which trick the senses into seeing visual illusions will be explored in relation to traditions of "Natural Magic" as well as a secularization of magical practices into entertainment from the Renaissance on. The early trick films of Méliès and others will be discussed in relation to the tradition of stage magic in the 19th century, as well as a particular reception of the magical nature of new technologies (electricity, photography, sound recording). The relation between cinema and hypnosis, both as a social concern and as metapsychological description of spectatorship will also be explored. A consideration of the appeal of magic systems of thought (spiritualism, theosophy, ritual magic) for Avant-Garde movement and their relation to experimental films by Epstein, Artaud, Deren, Anger, Smith, Fischinger, and others.

This seminar is concerned with debates, within and on the margins of the Frankfurt School (Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Lowenthal, Kluge, et al.), on the transformation of culture in capitalist modernity. We will focus on discussions concerning the technological media, in particular film (but also photography, radio, and television) and new forms of subjectivity, reception, and publicness catalyzed by these media. We will consider the issue of alternative cinema, for example through responses to Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, as well as the question of a specific aesthetics of film and its relevance in the age of video and digital media. Not least, this course is about how to read, and work with, theoretical texts. MA students by permission of instructor only.

Classic French cinema (from the earliest filmmakers to the beginnings of the New Wave) will be studied through the examples of ten movies, which influenced its history and represented the development of an esthetical movement: the French school before 1914 (Louis Feuillade's Fantômas), the "avant-garde" of the 20s (Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher), the surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or), the musical comedy (Rene Clair's Le Million), the "100% talking" film (Sacha Guitry's Le Roman d'un tricheur), the poetic realism (Jean Renoir's La Bête humaine, Marcel Carne Le Jour se lève), the cinema under the Occupation (Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau), the evocation of the Belle Epoque (Max Ophuls' Le Plaisir), the revival of the literary adaptation (Robert Bresson's Journal d'un cure de campagne.

This course deals with theories of time, history and representation while making those ideas and problems concrete through a study of the way in which history in Japan has been mediated by the cinema. It explores the "timefulness" of cinematic images without assuming their automatic relation to the world or dismissing films for their invention, compression, and elision of historical facts. A close reading of a wide range of films produced in and about Japan in tandem with primary and secondary materials on theories of time, images, and national history will highlight the historicity and history of both film and Japan. All readings are in English; no knowledge of Japanese is required. Co-taught by professors of film studies and Japanese history this course seeks to focus attention on the emerging nexus between audio-visual media and historical studies.

Knowledge of German required The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 cemented the divison of Germany but it also, paradoxically, catalyzed a period of aesthetic experimentation and political ferment in West Germany and in the GDR. Beginning with the differing accounts of l961 produced on either side of the Wall, this course compares the cultural life of both Germanies, as manifested in literature and in film. Our focus is at once on aesthetic questions (late modernism, New Waves, the relationship between avant-garde and documentary impulses) and artistic attempts to process social and policial developments (the generation gap: the new, divided topography of Berlin; the Auschwitz trials, new discussions of fascism and stalinism; the student and feminist movements).