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.
Throughout Eastern Europe, New Wave filmmaking emerged in the late 1950s as part of a larger political and cultural de-Stalinization process and in response to earlier modes of Communist film culture. This course follows the attempts of New Wave filmmakers to reform socialism (and the cinema as an institution), and their search for a form adequate to describe political life and historical experience in their full complexity. Screenings include pathbreaking films from Poland (Wajda, Zanussi, Skolimowski, Kieslowski); the Soviet Union (Kalatozov, Paradjanov, Kozintsev); the German Democratic Republic (Wolf, Beyer, Klein); Hungary (Jancsó, Makk, Kovács, Meszáros, Tarr); Czechoslovakia (Nemec, Forman, Chytilová, Jakubisko); and Yugoslavia (Makavejev). All films will be subtitled; knowledge of relevant languages and (film)cultures welcome but not necessary.
There has been an alternative cinema in the United States from the earliest days of Hollywood, but it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the first works of such figures as Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Anger and, especially, Maya Deren, that disparate film artists came together in what would become a coherent avant-garde filmmaking community or movement. Inspired by developments in poetry, dance, painting, and music, and by European filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Cocteau, these filmmakers set about creating a new genre of film, and a new kind of film language. A remarkable flourishing of independent, personal cinema soon followed, in an incredible variety of styles. This class will look at the historical development of the American avant-garde cinema from these early filmmakers through the intensely creative, productive period of the 1960s, and the fragmented state of the avant-garde in the years that followed. Using methodologies taken from cinema studies and other disciplines, especially art history, and looking at the films alongside contemporaneous work in other mediums, we will attempt to develop a valid critical language to describe and analyze these sui generis films and filmmakers. Filmmakers studied include Deren, Anger, Cornell, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas and Joyce Wieland.
Consent of Instructor Primary focus will be on Capra's programmatic series of films from the 30s and 40s, especially Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It's a Wonderful Life, and The State of the Union. But we will also attend to a range of other achievements: his pioneering contributions to screwball comedy (e.g., Platinum Blonde and It Happened One Night); his less widely-known early work for Columbia Pictures (e.g., The Miracle Woman, American Madness and The Bitter Tea of General Yen); the best of his silent films (Strong Man and Long Pants); and his contributions to the Why We Fight series of educational/propaganda films. The course will attempt to locate Capra both within the contexts of comparable Hollywood filmmaking (work by Ford, McCarey, Sturges, and Hawks) and the long history of sentimentality and spectatorship that extends back through Dickens and into the eighteenth-century emergence of the sentimental novel and its theorization. We will also deal with Capra's preoccupation with his cinematic "authorship," which will mean some attention not only to his signature gestures in the films but also to biographical issues. Finally, we will consider recent films that conspicuously redeploy "Capraesque" modes of representing ethical and political experience in America: e.g., The Hudsucker Proxy, Hero, It Could Happen to You, Groundhog Day, and Dave. One short paper and one long, and a take home exam.
The current version of the description reads: "This class surveys the history of Israeli film as well as critical methods with which to approach it. The principal interest of the class is to examine Israeli films as a “national cinema” by considering the various ways in which they reflect, enforce, and perpetuate – and also criticize and deconstruct – the dominant Israeli national ideologies and myths. We will explore how the developing Israeli film industry related in different historical moments to the efforts of the Israeli state to define its own identity, history, borders and aesthetic traditions, and discuss the film in light of topics such as the Zionist conception of Jewish history, the trauma of the holocaust, the project of Israeli nation- building, and the changes in Israeli culture’s representations of “others” on grounds of nationality, religion, ethnicity, and gender. Class screenings will include Israeli films that range from the pre- Israeli state Zionist propaganda films, to the nationalistic-heroic cinema of the young state, the mid- 1960s attempts at establishing an “Israeli New Wave,” and to today’s unprecedented international critical and commercial success of Israeli cinema."
This pro-seminar will consider the intermedia indentification of the Expressionist movement, especially in Germany. As has happened with few other modern art movements, Expressionism has consistently been linked with the visual and literary arts, and also with film; however, the precise interactions and formal kinships of these manifold Expressionist manifestations, especially film, continue to lack critical comparative analysis. In this course we set out to explore sytematically these interstices.
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.
This seminar explores the proposition that cinema (in general? particular kinds of cinema?) during the first decades of the 20th century represented a form of "vernacular modernism" -- an aesthetic expression of, and response to, the social and cultural experience of modernity and modernization that was primarily market-based and at once threatened, influenced, and by-passed the institutions of art and literature. In addition to a sample of Hollywood films (slapstick comedies, Traffic in Souls, The Crowd, Gold Diggers of 1933), we will discuss films from Soviet Russia, Germany, France, and, depending on availability, China and Japan. In addition to thematic concerns such as crises of gender, sexuality and class, the contradictions of consumption, industrial labor and urban living conditions, we will focus on the formal and stylistic ways in which these films articulate the material fabric of everyday life, a new relation with things, a specifically modern sense of character, identity, and performance, as well as the ways in which they address and ENGLage their viewers. Readings will include debates on modernism and mass culture as well as more contemporaneous texts (Kracauer, Benjamin, Epstein, Dulac, Kuleshov, Shklovsky, selections from the magazine Close-Up).
This is the second part of the international survey history of film covering the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly recommended that students take the first section first. This course focuses on industrial practices and aesthetics during Hollywood's studio era (1927 to 1960) and alternatives to the Hollywood film, including French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, and Japanese cinema. We will also consider the important political, economic, social and cultural forces, which influenced Hollywood and other cinemas during this period, particularly the rise of fascism in the 1930s, WWII, Hollywood's postwar economic struggles, and various national new wave cinemas. Screenings will include films by Berkeley, Renoir, Huston, Welles, De Sica, Ozu, Hitchcock and Godard.
Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. May not be counted toward distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a free-elective credit.
