Spring

Consent of faculty adviser and Director of Undergraduate Studies:Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.

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.

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century but his influence on cinema is just as powerful. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht’s own theatre, from the anarchic plays and agitprop film and theatre of the 1920’s to the classical parable plays, as well as the work of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill), and Subsaharan Africa (Soyinka, Ngugi, and various South African theatre practitioners). We will also consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht’s own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, and Djibril Diop Mambety.

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.

CMST 379, Anthro, ENGL 295/435, German, Music 227/305, GSHum 210/310

COVA 23800 or instructor consent; lab fee $60 billed directly on tuition bill. A production course geared towards experimental works and video within a studio art context. Screenings will include recent works by Harrison & Wood, Fischli & Weiss, Martin Kersels, Jane & Louise Wilson, Halflifers, Douglas Gordon and others. Discussions and readings will address non-narrative strategies, rapidly changing technology and viable approaches to producing video art in a world full of video images. Lab fee $60.

The history and aesthetics of radical interpretation of canonical works in theater, opera, film. Examination of aesthetic tracts (e.g. Appia, Artaud, Brecht, Peter Brooks), theory (Barthes, Derrida, E. Diamond, Foucault), as well as modern forays into radical interpretation (e.g. Derek Jarman/Marlowe’s Edward II, Patrice Chereau/Wagner’s Ring, Peter Sellers/Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Sally Potter’s Thriller, and recent work by the Wooster Group).

This course examines Hindi film at a very particular juncture in Indian film history, through the works of three of the most illustrious directors of the so-called classical era, Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor, and Guru Dutt the latter two were also extremely popular actors. It is an attempt to look at Hindi film as film, and not as a socio-political text pregnant with ideological meaning. It is a course designed to understand the particular aesthetic logic and affect of popular Hindi cinema. It does this first by tracing the genealogy of film s arrival in the subcontinent, looking at the various changing aesthetic, political and social strands that converged to allow this and contributed to the particular mode of Hindi film, such as poetry and drama, colonialism and communalism. Each director s cinematic technique, structure and style will be studied in depth, with a particular attention to the relation of these films to what is understood as the melodramatic genre. Requirements: A weekly response paper (one page maximum) on the week's reading. A midterm paper: a close stude of one scene of any screened film. A final paper: a discussion of at least three films seen in the course, using one of the analytic methods studied.

This course will introduce students to the tradition of independent, experimental cinema in North America. From the relatively isolated pre-war contributions of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, Douglass Crockwell, Ralph Steiner, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Florey to the more concentrated post-war emergence of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Sidney Peterson, Kenneth Anger, Harry Smith, and Bruce Conner, North America has consistently supported an artisanal, independent, avant-garde film culture. While rarely reaching the level of mass popularity, this film community has developed a richness and complexity equal to what we find in painting and music -- arts with which it has often been in conversation. This course will concentrate on periods of greatest visibility and impact -- the 1960s and 1970s -- examining the development of underground film, personal cinema, "expanded cinema," minimalism, and structural film, paying particular attention to film’s interaction with other arts. We will end by taking stock or recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s. Filmmakers will include Christopher MacLaine, Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Andy Warhol, Joyce Wieland, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton, Carolee Schneeman, Yvonne Rainer, Morgan Fischer, Abigail Child, Martin Arnold, Lewis Klahr, Su Friedrich, and Brian Frye.

The period between the World Wars in Germany, known as the Weimar Republic, arguably stands as the highpoint of German cinema: the years from 1918 to 1933 witnessed an incredible degree of technical and artistic achievement in filmmaking. Film critics and historians have written about the era obsessively, partly because of that degree of mastery. Beginning with the earliest works on Weimar cinema, however, film historians such as Siegfried Kracauer (From Caligari to Hitler, 1947) and Lotte Eisner (The Haunted Screen, 1969) have dealt with the ways in which film drew upon and influenced other art forms, reflected national psychology, and influenced society. More recent studies have emphasized and interrogated the problematic representations of sexuality and gender in films of the period. With their many sexualized monsters, doubles, femmes fatales, and cross-dressers and their thematization of vision and desire, these films suggest the highly contested nature of sexuality at the time. In this course we will view several of the key cinematic texts of the period (and some lesser known ones as well) and think critically about their depictions of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. We will also read contemporary documents as well as early and recent theoretical and historical works on the period that ask what sorts of sexual subjects Weimar cinema proposes.