Spring

This course explores acting in film from critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives. We'll consider how film has borrowed from theatrical traditions and how acting has been transformed in the age of mechanical reproduction and through film editing, sound technologies, and digital imaging. We'll consider links between theatrical traditions and film, such as reading Chaplin and the Marx Brothers against commedia dell'arte, and vaudeville; Lillian Gish's performance in D.W. Griffith films against 19th century traditions of pantomime and melodrama; the Method in theatre and film; and improvisation in Cassavetes films. We'll consider avant-garde practice, Brechtian performance, and the use of non-actors in film. We'll consider institutional factors, such as historical casting practices, that affect acting. We'll consider the role of character actors and the meaning and practice of typecasting. Students will be expected to write one 15 page paper and weekly one page comments on readings. There will be one screening a week.

This course surveys a range of 20th century African American literary works that have been adapted to the screen in order to explore the formal and stylistic relationships between literature and the cinema, as well as our approaches to them as objects of study. How are different literary forms and genres and approaches (i.e., novels, plays, short stories, poetry, autobiography, melodrama, social realism) translated into cinematic terms? What tools of literary analysis can or should we bring to the interpretation of cinematic texts - adaptations and others? How can we think about the "authorship" of an adaptation? How are films with Black literary origins presented to and received by different readers/audiences? We will pay particular attention to the ways in which race inflects issues of production, representation and address between literary and cinematic institutions. Texts include essays on adaptation by Bazin, Eisenstein, Naremore and cases of adaptation such as A Raisin in the Sun; Native Son; "King of the Bingo Game"; Cotton Comes to Harlem; The Color Purple; Daughters of the Dust.

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.

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.

COVA 10100 or 10200, or consent of instructor. Using the Macintosh platform this course serves as an introduction to the use of digital technology as a means of making visual art. Instruction will cover Photo Shop's graphics program as well as digital imaging hardware (scanners, storage, and printing). In addition we will be addressing problems of color, design, collage, and drawing. Topics of discussion may include questions regarding the mediated image and its relationship to art as well as examining what constitutes the "real" in contemporary culture. Lab fee $60.

This course surveys what Wahneemah Lubiano calls, "the Spike Lee Discourse" - the films and other media work Lee has produced, alongside the public persona he has constructed through his appearances in print media, television, advertising and the Internet. How has Lee negotiated (and influenced) the realms of independent and Hollywood filmmaking traditions and institutions? How does he (as director, writer, producer, actor, author, entrepreneur, advertising executive) push the boundaries of auteur approaches to reading his films, as well as traditional definitions of African American cinema? How can we talk about Lee's career as a reflection of post-classical cinematic sensibilities and marketing strategies? How has he drawn from and shaped discourses on Black masculinity, entrepreneurship, and cultural politics? We will watch Lee's films (possibly in conjunction with a Doc Films series) from his student thesis film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982) to Bamboozled (2000), read his writings, survey critical literature on his work, and place him in a series of critical/political constellations (e.g., the Black Arts movement and collective cultural production; Afrocentricity; Black conservativism; hip hop aesthetics).

This survey course on Iranian cinema begins nineteen years before the Islamic revolution and examines the early careers of current Iranian filmmakers as well as the influence of Hollywood and the Hindi film on this period. In the post-revolutionary period, we focus mainly on the films made for international circulation. We examine the major films and directors from this period with regard to the emergence of feminist filmmaking, cinema's relation to Iranian modernity, and the transnational context of these films.

This course explores the history of Chinese cinema from its inception to the end of the Republican Period. We will focus on the way cinema helped articulate competing models of modernity revolving around issues in larger cultural contexts, including the rise of modern entertainment and consumer culture as well as the political events that overwhelmed the country (the May Fourth movement of cultural enlightenment, the Northern Expedition, the Japanese invasion and the Chinese resistance, and the postwar reconstructions). We will pay particular attention to the following issues: the exhibition contexts of Chinese cinema; questions of reception, stardom, and the cinema's public status; interactions between cinema and other media including drama, photography, and popular illustrations; the emergence of sound and its impact on the commercial and political arena; the geographical shift of film production and exhibition centers during the war. Films include early Edison shorts shot in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai in the late 1890s, the earliest extant Chinese film The Laborer's Love, 1920s' genre films (costume films, martial arts films, family melodrama), left-wing and urban films in the 1930s', films made in occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, the 'national defense' films made in Chongqing, and postwar films from 1945 to 1949. Throughout the course, we will pursue the development of film style and film culture in relation to wider aesthetic, cultural, and political concerns. Some knowledge in Chinese desirable but not required.