Spring

In this research-intensive graduate seminar, students will engage with a range of methods, questions, and approaches to conducting archival research in filmic, paper and print, and internet databases, and in both American and foreign contexts. While some class content will unfold around archival materials related to French film and art practice between 1930-1950, and to the discursive transformations around concepts of materiality and visual aesthetics therein, we will also explore a range of texts on archival methodology; selected texts on archival theory; and case-studies foregrounding modes of archival discovery, evaluation, and interpretation. With the aim of training students for “deep dive” explorations of material and visual culture, students will be expected to conduct original research on a topic of their own design beginning in week 2. To be considered for this seminar, interested students should thus submit a short (1-2 paragraph) research proposal prior to registration. Proposals do not have to focus on French or Francophone topics, nor do they have to be fully developed. They must, however, propose a set of coherent and exploratory, if tentative, questions or propositions that the student will explore through intensive archival research. Proposals should be sent to jenniferwild@uchicago.edu at least 2 weeks prior to spring quarter 2016.NB: All students (doctoral, MAPH, or MAPS) who are interested in this seminar, but who do not have a specific research question, agenda, or object, are nevertheless encouraged to enroll. Such students will be provided with directed questions, topics, or objects for archival research, or research related to the theoretical dimensions of the archive. These students may work collaboratively or in small groups with the aim of building a foundation in primary research methods and objectives, which will lead to a final dossier on their research findings, methodological challenges, roadblocks, and breakthroughs.

Taking a comparative approach to films made in the United States and the Soviet Union during the period of the Cold War, this course will survey how the long-running confrontation of two global superpowers, understood as both a political conflict and a cultural phenomenon, mobilized a range of styles, genres, and film technology in the decades-long battle of claims and images. Beginning with the pre-history of the conflict and extending to its perceived conclusion in the late 1980s, we will consider cinema’s role in presenting, shaping, and questioning archetypal images and narratives. We will examine what aspects of cinema lend themselves to political agitation, by considering how American and Soviet bureaucrats and filmmakers made use of cinematographic elements to assert ideological claims and to reinforce them through appeals to the senses. Along with the influence of politics on film production and aesthetics, we will consider cinematic reflections of Cold War events such as the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange Agreement of 1958 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. As we chart the history of Cold War film styles and their strategies, we will consider both explicitly propagandistic films as well as those that stray from the conflict’s headline issues, but have significant bearing on it.

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.

In this class, we will study  nineteenth and twentieth-century visual and written texts from primarily French photographic, literary, painterly, and cinematic traditions. These thematically interrogate spatial, cultural, geographic, social, and political margins.  By also examining the long-standing and often fraught historical and theoretical relationship between text and image, we will simultaneously investigate the boundaries between divergent media practices (photography, literature, film, painting) in order to question the visual, narrative, and philosophic limits of representation.This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical and visual arts.

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.

The course proposes an introduction to audio-visual literacy through the analysis of films, selective readings, and short film exercises focusing on fundamental cinematic elements such as shot, framing, point of view, camera movement, editing, and relations of image and sound. Assignments will consist in in writing review sheets and a formal film analysis, and in creating 1-3 minute single-shot movies based on the works seen and discussed in class.This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical and visual arts.

This two part course provides a critical and historical survey of the major questions, concepts, and trends in film theory since 1968.  Organized broadly around questions of film, ideology, and spectatorship, weekly readings, films, and discussion will examine how the study of film in the last forty years has been influenced by semiology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, critical race studies, gay and lesbian criticism, and post-colonial theory, especially with respect to theories of spectatorship.

This multilevel studio will investigate minimalist strategies in artists’ film and video from the late 1960s to the present day.  Emphasis will be placed on works made with limited means and/or with “amateur” formats such as Super-8 and 16mm film, camcorders, Flip cameras, SLR video, and iPhone or iPad.  Our aim is to imagine how to produce complex results from economical means.  Important texts will be paired with in class discussion of works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Kurt Kren, Jack Goldstein, Larry Gottheim, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, John Baldessari, Morgan Fisher, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, Sam Taylor-Wood, and others.

The main questions to be discussed are: the bearing of cinema on philosophy; or in what sense, if any, is cinema a form of philosophical thought? What sort of distinctive aesthetic object is a film, or what is the “ontology” of film? What, in particular, distinguishes a “realist” narrative film? What is a “Hollywood” film? What is a Hollywood genre? Authors to be read include, among others, Bazin, Cavell, Perkins, Wilson, Rothman. Films to be seen and discussed, among others, include films by Bresson, Ford, Ophuls, Cukor, Hitchcock, and the Dardenne brothers.