Spring

This course examines selected themes in 20th-century American political history through both the literature written by historians, and filmic representations by Hollywood and documentary filmmakers. We will read one historical interpretation and view one film on themes like the following: Woodrow Wilson and WW I, the emergence of Pacific Rim cities like Los Angeles, Roosevelt's New Deal, the Japanese-American experience in World War II, McCarthyism and the Korean War, the cold war and the nuclear balance of terror, the radical movements of the 1960s, and multiculturalism in the 1990s.

CMST 10100. 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.

Max Ophüls has variously been discussed as a master of the long take and mise-en-scene, of theatrical adaptation and self-conscious narration; as director of the "woman's film," of melodramatic pathos and irony; and as artist and analyst of erotic - and cinematic - obsession.  Following the trajectory of his life and work from Germany through France, Italy, Hollywood, and back to Europe, we will consider Ophüls' films in terms of style and genre; the question of his gynocentric aesthetic and the feminist debate surrounding it; authorship and industrial production; and the challenge diasporic film practice poses to paradigms of national cinema and national film history.  Films include Liebelei, La Signora di tutti, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment, La Ronde, Madame de..., Le Plaisir, and Lola Montès. 

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.Required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies

We shall analyze films and fictional works that reflect both realities and myths about the “Eternal City,” Rome. Classical Rome will not be studied; instead the focus will be on a trajectory of works, both written and cinematic, that are set in and explore late nineteenth to late twentieth-century Rome. The goal is to analyze some of the numerous diverse representations of modern Rome that portray historical, political, subjective, and/or fantastical/mythopoetic elements that have interacted over time to produce the palimpsest that is the city of Rome. Books by D’Annunzio, Moravia, Pasolini and Malerba; films by Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Moretti. Taught in English; Italian majors will read the texts in the original Italian.

Students in this course screen and discuss films to consider whether there is a Chicago style of filmmaking. We 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; and the design, politics, cultures, and labor of its people, as well as 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.

“How would Lubitsch do it?” asks Billy Wilder, who famously hang this question in his office. He asked the question hanging in the minds of generations of filmmakers around the world, most likely including Lubitsch himself. In a career spanning nearly three decades, Lubitsch’s name has come to denote a style about style, first exported from Germany to Hollywood and then from Hollywood to the world. In this sense, Lubitsch is first and foremost a filmmaker for filmmakers, and his style decidedly an international one. It is the goal of this course to examine a broadly defined international stylistic history developed by and associated with Lubitsch, whose legacy cannot be adequately assessed without such a perspective. With dual emphases on formal and historical analyses, we will look at Lubitsch’s early Weimar comedy and epic films, American silent masterpieces, musicals, sound comedies, and political farces, as well as Lubitsch-esque films made in Japan, China, and France.

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the late 1950s through the 1990s.  We will focus on New Cinemas in France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the United states, the UK, and other countries.  We will pay special attention to experimental stylistic developments, women directors, and well-known auteurs.  After the New Cinema era we will examine various developments in world cinema, including the rise of Bollywood, East Asian film cultures, and other movements.  A course like this is necessarily going to omit many important films and filmmakers, but we will try to attenuate those omissions by scheduling two screenings a week.

This seminar will focus on how to craft a creative thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The workshop will also develop the written portion of the creative thesis. The class is limited to seniors from CMS and DOVA, and MAPH students working on a creative thesis.

This seminar looks at and behind the history of film. What lies behind every film history is a set of assumptions we call the historical understanding of cinema. How do we explain films historically and how do film histories differ depending on what explanation we chose? To get a sense of this we will watch a number of films and read what others wrote about them. We will be looking at those points in the space of film history which caused and still cause debates among historians and theorists of film. How and why cinema shifted formats from peepshow to screen? What factors and forces stand behind the cinema of attractions and the cinema of narration? What happened that pushed cinema from shorts to features? At which point and to what extent did what was born as international industry begin dressing as so many national cinemas? At what point and how cinema declared itself a form of art, part of an art movement, or a manifestation of an ideology? Different histories offer different historical interpretations; our task is to bring out and test some of them.