Spring

Consent of instructor based on well-developed idea or a video project already in process. This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Sutdents are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques concentrate on the handheld camera versus tripod, interviewing and microphone placement, and lighting for the interview. Post-production covers editing techniques and distribution strategies. Students then screen final projects in a public space.

Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.

COVA 10100, 10200, 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 $60.

Known primarily for films that establish him as a Hollywood insider (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot), Billy Wilder began his five-decade-long career in Weimar Germany and France and returned to Germany in 1945, where he worked on a documentary on Nazi death camps (Todesmühlen / Mills of Death) and A Foreign Affair. Through close readings of exemplary films, we will explore Wilder's range from gentle ethnographer of modern life to caustic satirist of American society and the culture industry, focusing on issues of authorship and reception (in particular his exclusion from the auteurist canon). In addition, we will consider his uneven relation to Hollywood genres, his systematic blurring of boundaries between comedy, romance, and drama.

The figure of the detective and the criminal and the process of detection and capture have formed one of the most enduring and international genres in cinema. This course will trace the patterns, character, stylistic devices and thematic preoccupations of the topos through film history, beginning with the serial films of the silent era and ending with modernist works in which the detective stands for a host of issues dealing with narration, and investigation, temporality and evidence. The course will also read some classic selections of detective fiction and deal with both generic issues and theoretical and social implications. Films to be shown are likely to include: Fantomas, One Exciting Night, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The Maltese Falcon, Alphaville, and Memento.

CMST 10100 Introduction to Film Analysis. This is the second part of a two quarter course. Completion of Cinema in Japan: From Classical Cinema to the Golden Age is recommended but not required. This course will survey Japanese cinema from the "new wave" of the late 1950s to the present day. We will focus on both aspects of the object of study: Japan and the cinema. Each week will present, in roughly chronological order, a "moment" from the history of Japanese cinema and a methodological issue in film studies brought into focus by that week's films. For example, we will study histories of "new wave" cinema in the light of films from the Nikkatsu and Shochiku studios. We will also study ideas of "political modernism" and the new art cinema of the late 1960s, theories of ethnicity and Japanese representations of the Other, approaches to popular culture and the Japanese musical, and contemporary transnational auteurs. We will also consider the relation between cinema and other media such as television in postwar Japan, and various forms of cinema such as documentary, photographic narrative, and animation. Directors covered in the course include Kurosawa Akira, Masumura Yasuzo, Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Kitano Takeshi, and Miyazaki Hayao. The course is open to graduate and undergraduate students. No knowledge of Japanese is required but special accommodations will be made for students with Japanese reading ability.

This will be an interdisciplinary course looking at Russian culture between 1900 and 1930 - the period usually seen as two miracle decades in Russian art, literature, theater and film. Beside arts, the course will also focus on "everyday life" - what it was like to be living in Russia in the period of modernism and modernization. The emphasis thus will be not only on acknowledged 'masterpieces' (like Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg or Kazimir Malevich's painting "The Knife Grinder," but also on new fashions, furniture, and technological marvels; We will look not only at Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (with its official reputation as "the best movie ever made"), but also at run-of-the mill movies - and at what people enjoyed about them.

This course examines cinema in Africa as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub-Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted with a South African film, The Magic Garden (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film.

Background in film theory or at least one course in cinema studies. Enrollment limited; MA students by permission of instructor only. In this seminar, we will consider debates on film and mass culture in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (or, more precisely, Critical Theory), focusing mainly on Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Discussions will revolve around the following issues: the impact of technology on artistic practices and the institution of art; consumerism and new forms of subjectivity and reception; the democraticization of culture and the "culture industry"; theories of the public sphere and its transformation (Habermas, Negt/Kluge). We will consider these debates both in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts and from the perspective of cinema in globalized and digital media culture. Texts will be read in translation, but reading knowledge of German will be highly useful.

Symbolism and cinema; abstract films; Cubist cinema, Expressionist cinema, film and Futurist art; Constructivism and film; Surrealist moviemaking - will be the principal intersections of art and film this seminar will address and explore.