Spring

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.

While the study of melodrama has been of key significance for feminist film theory, the formal constraints of ‘doomed romance’ suggest another approach to ways in which psychoanalytic and narrative theory might be applied to the cinema. Through a chronological selection of relevant films, these seminars will use this theoretical context to reflect on the corporealization of emotion on the screen and the interweaving of human movement, gesture and look with the expressive forms of cinema itself. As both narrative and psychic drives lead towards death while being delayed by desire, character and plot are left with little room for manoeuvre bringing formal questions of narrative, performance and the cinematic into high relief. The films will include, for example, F.W. Murnau’s 1927 Sunrise, Joseph von Sternberg’s 1931 Morocco, Max Ophuls’ 1953 Madame de… Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 Vertigo, J-L Godard’s 1965 Pierrot le Fou and Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 In the Mood for Love

France in the twentieth century saw a proliferation of discourses on everyday life, as well as efforts to represent daily reality using literary and cinematographic means. Early on, the rise of the cinema effected a vast transformation of the perception of everyday objects and experience; shortly after, the avant-garde’s ambition to transform life through art entailed the critique of a contemporary reality perceived as debased, and the re-imagining of the spaces and gestures of ordinary existence. After World War II, interdisciplinary efforts to theorize the everyday enter into dialogue with cinematic, literary, and artistic works. Through the study of key literary, cinematic, and theoretical works, we will reflect on and define a set of categories and concepts that will assist our study of the political, aesthetic, and epistemological ambiguity and resonance of the everyday. Topics for discussion will include modernism and urban experience, the spaces and the politics of everyday life, avant-gardism and the transformation of the ordinary, and the relationship of fiction and documentary. Authors and filmmakers may include: Aragon, Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Certeau, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Rouch, Debord, Ackerman, Marker. The course will be taught in English, with an option to do readings and written assignments in French. Screenings are mandatory.

This seminar explores the history of cinema as a new medium for "propaganda and agitation" in the context of Japan's wars in Asia and the Pacific, 1937-1945. We will study Japanese films as part of a global 1930s "illiberal modernism" while simultaneously exploring more local sources of wartime cinema, in the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde, and the broader image culture of wartime Japan. We will also explore how the medium was deployed in Japan's colonies (Taiwan and Korea), client states (Manchuria), and occupied territories (Eastern China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc).  English will be the lingua-franca for the course but there will also be opportunities to read primary and secondary Japanese documents, and materialin other languages.  No Asian language requirement, but there will be Japanese and other non-English readings for students with appropriate language skills.

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.

In this course we will consider the intimate if often reluctant involvement of cinema with politics in three periods of modern Chinese history. We will start with the attempts by the Communist Party and Nationalist state alike to use the nascent Chinese cinema for ideological indoctrination in the 1930s, continue with the increasingly total ideological and aesthetic control of cinema during the Socialist era from 1949 onward and end with the critique of that totalitarianism and explorations of previously-proscribed techniques and subjectivities in the post-Socialist cinema of the 1980s. The "big question" we will explore is the interweaving of politics and aesthetics. A distinctive feature of Chinese cinema is that it has seen heavy intervention by political and intellectual elites. Some wanted to use cinema for mass education or indoctrination. Others were against such uses--but for what reasons? We will also read some of the latest scholarship on Chinese cinema that departs from this top-down paradigm and attempts a less elitest look at Chinese cinema and mass media. Key terms include "social realism," "socialist realism," "melodrama" and "vernacular modernism."

American film melodrama has been considered both the genre of suffering protagonists, incredible coincidences, and weeping spectators as well as a mode of action, suspense, and in-the-nick-of-time escapes. In this course, we will examine American film melodrama in terms of a dialectic of sentiment and sensation that draws heavily on Gothic tropes of terror, live burial, and haunted internal states. We will trace the origins of film melodrama and the cinematic Gothic to their literary antecedents, the horrors of the French Revolution, and classical and sensational stage melodramas of the nineteenth century. In addition to the 1940s Gothic woman’s film cycle, we will excavate the Gothic in the maternal melodrama of the 1930s, the suspense thriller, noir detective film, domestic melodrama, the birth of the slasher film, and the supernatural horror film of the 1970s. Literary sources will include works by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Directors considered will include D.W. Griffith, King Vidor, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk, William Friedkin, Tim Burton, and our major example, Alfred Hitchcock.

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 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.