Spring

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

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.

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 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 survey will deal with issues of film form, industry organization and film culture during three decades, focusing on the crystallization of the Classical Hollywood Film as a key issue. But international alternatives to Hollywood will also be discussed, from the unique forms of Japanese cinema to movements like Italian Neo-realism and the beginnings of the New Wave in France. Film style, from the classical scene break down to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting) will form the center of the course, while attention will also be paid to the development of a film culture. Texts will include Bordwell and Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, Godard and others. Screenings will include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleakness but his experiments with theatre and film echo the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and film including Chaplin and Keaton) as well as the artistic avant-garde (Dreyer in film; Jarry and Artaud in theatre). This course will juxtapose this early twentieth century work with Beckett’s plays on stage and screen, and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Duras) and successors. Contemporary authors will depend on availability but may include Vinaver, Minyana, Lagarce in France, Pinter, Greenaway in the UK; Foreman, Wellman in the US. Theoretical work may include texts by Artaud, Barthes, Derrida, Josette Feral, Peggy Phelan, Bert States and others. Working knowledge of French would be very helpful but is not absolutely required.

ARTV 23901 or consent of instructor. This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Students are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques focus 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. Lab fee $50.

This class traces the deployment of cinema as both national culture and “optical weapon” during a time of total war. We will study the Film Law of 1939 and the "national policy films" and "people's films" that attempted to raise the aesthetic and technical level of cinema in Japan in order to compete with the memory of Hollywood films both at "home" and in the Asian countries occupied by Japan. The class will include films made under Japanese sponsorship in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea as well as in the puppet state of Manchuria and the occupied territory of Shanghai. We will also study local sources of wartime Japanese cinema -- the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde -- in the context of the broader image culture of wartime Japan. No knowledge of Japanese is required: separate section for discussion of Japanese and other Asian sources.

This course is a survey of Latin American cinema with a critical focus on the debates surrounding national and transnational film. The first third of the course will examine the critiques and defenses of national cinema, attending in particular to the distinct concerns of postcolonial polities. In Latin America, these concerns have included cultural imperialism arising from neocolonial economic relations, the incorporation of non-white majorities into foundational myths of national origin, and the construction of cohesive national histories and traditions. The second third of the course will consider the differences between national cinema before and after the advent of the New Latin American Cinema in the 1960s. With the emergence of a New Latin American Cinema and the associated theory and criticism of the 1960s, national cinema was tied to an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics. Aesthetic modernism, left political radicalism, and the new attempt to make a properly national cinema were joined in a single continental cinema project. But with the waning of left politics in the region and the intellectual challenges to the core-periphery schemas associated with the dependency school, new questions have arisen about the validity of that project. The last third of the course will explore recent debates about globalization, transnationalism, and post-nationalism—reflected in the critical discussion of films like City of God and Y tu mamá también—and how they are revising the terms of the 1960s controversies, for better and for worse. Films will include Memorias del subdesarrollo, La hora de los hornos, El Coraje del pueblo, Ganga Bruta, Araya, Sin dejar huella, La cienaga.

Independent film plays a major role in contemporary Catalan culture. As the Franco regime came to an end and an incipient democracy began to take hold, Barcelona gradually became a cosmopolitan, cultural center with a clear penchant for European tendencies. Its burgeoning publishing industry provided fertile ground for new forms of art, design, advertising, architecture, comics, etc. New collaborations sprung up among filmmakers, architects, and multidisciplinary artists, who opened the way toward new aesthetics.Independent filmmakers consciously veered away from the stylistic and narrative formulas of the mainstream film industry. In their search for new, genuine forms of expression, they kept a keen eye on what was going on in contemporary literature, music and art. This general outloook reached a highpoint in the late sixties with the "Escuela de Barcelona" films. With filmmakers such as Pere Portabella, Joaquim Jordà or Jacinto Esteva a new film form crystallized which would continue in later independent, avant-garde and underground films during the 70s and 80s.We can trace these experimental aesthetics down to even more recent independent Catalan filmmakers such as José Luis Guerín, Marc Recha or Albert Serra. Thus, the purpose of this course is to illuminate how independent Catalan film developed in relationship to literary and artistic works of their day, as well as to the social context in which they were created.

This course will screen and discuss films to consider whether there is a Chicago style of filmmaking. We will trace how the city informs documentary, educational, industrial, narrative feature, and avant-garde films. If there is a Chicago style of filmmaking, one must look at the landscape of the city, the design, politics, cultures, and labor of its people, and how they live their lives. The protagonists and villains in these films are the politicians and community organizers, our locations are the neighborhoods, and the set designers are Mies van der Rohe and the Chicago Housing Authority.