Spring

Recent cinema has often been seen as heavily dependent on “special effects” largely due to technological transformation in the digital cinematic image and its possibilities of radical alteration. However, visual effects have been part of cinema from its origins. This seminar seeks to approach “special effects” both historically and theoretically. Historically, we will view and discuss uses of special effect, both cinematic and mechanical, from the trick films of early cinema through the fantastic effects of the Weimar era, the institutionalization of effects during the Hollywood studio era, to the explosion of awareness of special effect consequent to the success of Star Wars and the rise of computer generated special effects that followed. Theoretically we will raise the issues of what makes “special effects’ “special”: how they relate to the interaction of narrative and spectacle, the address to the spectator and cinema’s foregrounding or concealing of technology. Readings will include Metz, Prince, Whissel, and Loew among others.

This advanced studio course is offered in conjunction with a Gray Center collaboration between D. N. Rodowick and Victor Burgin. We will investigate how creative practice can engage specific architectural sites and explore the erased or disappeared cultural histories, real and/or imagined, inscribed in those spaces.  Our focus will be the history of “The Mecca” apartment building. Despite great protest, The Mecca was demolished in 1952 as part of the expansion of the Illinois Institute of Design under the plan of Mies van der Rohe. This site and its Bronzeville environs thus present a variety of opportunities for exploring themes of displaced architectures, competing visions of modernism and utopia, and conflicts in popular and cultural memory. Students are expected to propose and pursue individual projects around this theme and to work experimentally with strategies of research and writing together with still and/or moving image production.  Field trips required.Pre-requisite(s): Prior coursework and/or experience with a camera-based practice (photography, film, video, 3D modelling) is required.  Admission to this course is by application and with consent of the instructors.

This course will explore the role of film music from its origins in silent film, its significance in the classical Hollywood film, to its increasingly self-reflexive use in recent cinema (both avant-garde and commercial, Western and non-Western). We will look at the ways music plays a central role both as part of the narrative and as non-diegetic music, how its stylistic diversity contributes another semiotic universe to the screen, and how it becomes a central qualifying agent in twentieth-century visual culture. Readings will include selections from Prendergast's, Film Music: A Neglected Art, Gorbman's Unheard Melodies, Kalinak's Settling the Score, Chion's Audio-Vision, Brown's Overtones and Undertones, Marks's Music and the Silent Film, as well as a number of theoretical texts by authors such as Eisler/Adorno, Eisenstein and Kracauer. Since the course will partly focus on technical, compositional, and stylistic aspects of film music, some reading knowledge of music will be helpful, but is not a prerequisite.

After examining the legacy of the New Wave, as well as the cultural and economic contexts for independent film production in France today, we will screen works by a new generation of filmmakers who have been instrumental in creating innovative approaches to cinematic narrative, form, and style. We will study feature films by Catherine Breillat, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Alain Guiraudie, Nicolas Philibert among others. Course readings will include interviews with filmmakers, analyses of their films, as well as contributions by Marc Augé, André Bazin, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Hammid Naficy, Jean-François Lyotard, Laura Mulvey, Stuart Hall,  and Linda Williams, which will provide theoretical frameworks for considerations of modernity and postmodernity, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism and ethnicity.

The apocalyptic imagination gained a new vitality and urgency in the late twentieth century, as various actual circumstances and phenomena, both manmade and natural, rose to consciousness as potentially world-ending.  From the potential for nuclear accidents and war, to catastrophic and irreversible degradation of the environment and biosphere, to moments of crisis for global capital, the end of the world, or at least of human life on earth, or at least of a certain human way of life on earth, seemed more real, and more likely, than ever before.This course will examine post-apocalyptic science fiction films from the late 1960s to the present, from a variety of national cinemas and modes of production. We will ask how the cinema imagines and images a post-apocalyptic world. How do different films conceive of “the end of the world?” What is “the world” that is ending, and what does it mean for it to “end”? Moreover, how is the world after the end configured and organized? What does that configuration—of labor, capital, politics, science, technology, ecology, society, the family, the individual, art—look like? What kinds of heroes are imagined, and why do they fight?Because this is a cinema and media studies class, we will also consider the production circumstances, modes, and techniques of each of the films. What effect do the contexts of a film’s production have on the way it images and imagines “life” after “the end”? What techniques and technologies have been deployed to render the world of the future in moving images? We will consider location shooting, special effects, and computer generated imagery, among others, as they relate to the way Hollywood and other modes adapt their approaches to changing circumstances and contingencies of production.Films may include Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Escape from LA,Omega Man, THX 1138, Waterworld, The Road, Silent Running, The Matrix,Resident Evil, Mad Max, La Jetée, Children of Men, Terminator, and The Hunger Games. Writers and thinkers may include Francis Fukuyama, Bill McKibben, Slavoj Zizek, Daniel Bell, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Donna Haraway, and David Harvey.NOTE: Open to MAPH students and undergraduates only.

Today the issue of violence in and against black communities seems ever present.  It is hard to live in black communities in the city of Chicago and not be confronted with the notion of violence and death. Whether it is the death of young black individuals such as Hadiya Pendelton, Derrion Albert, and Blair Holt or the hundreds of unnamed young black and Latino youth killed largely on Chicago’s south and west sides, there is a way in which the city seems to intimately link brown and black people to death and violence. This course will interrogate the topic of black and brown death and violence, with a focus on the politics, art, and other representations of black death. This interdisciplinary seminar is offered in conjunction with a larger collaborative project being carried out by political scientist CATHY COHEN, filmmaker ORLANDO BAGWELL and sculptor GARLAND MARTIN TAYLOR. We anticipate involving members of impacted communities and guest speakers in course meetings as well as holding some classes off-site in different neighborhoods and venues.  In conjunction with the course, Garland Taylor will begin construction of a large scale interactive sculpture in the Gray Center Lab, and Cathy Cohen will curate a series of workshops with invited guests at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.  Students will be required to attend these workshops.This course is sponsored by a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago.Cathy Cohen, Orlando Bagwell, Garland Taylor, M 9:30-12:20

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical and visual arts.

This course is designed both to teach basic terms and issues in the analysis of still and moving images, and also to give a brief history of those issues.  Readings will include excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Alberti, Wolflin, Riegl, Benjamin and others.  Images and moving images will serve as primary texts as feel.PQ: Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.

The course surveys elements of styles and techniques common to the visual arts. We will discuss framing and editing, moment and movement, action and narration and other visual devices as used by artists, photographers, architects and filmmakers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What can film tell us about comedy, and vice versa? This course investigates the comic procedures in various film forms - from silent slapstick and sophisticated comedy to screwball comedy and musical all the way to postmodern pastiche and mockumentary. Instead of treating film comedy as a self-contained genre, we will study how questions of comedy are central to the history of cinema. Readings include critical discourses about comedy, film history and film theory, e.g. Bergson, Freud, Benjamin, Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning and Noel Carroll. It is often said that a joke dies when we analyze it. We will see that it in fact reincarnates, if we analyze it the right way.