Spring

The aim of this course is to transmit in the most detailed possible way the constitutive éléments of my book Le Corps du cinema - hypnoses, émotions, animalités (P.O.L, Paris, 2009, 640 p.). I have tempted to present there a general view of cinema from three related points of view : hypnosis as a general correspondance of dispositif  between the hypnotic and the cinematographic situations; emotion as what is bodily and mentally produced through the experience of the films to which the spectators are submitted: animality as an inner dimension of the bodily experience, incarnated by the overwhelming presence of animals in so many and so many films through the whole develoment of cinema history. Those three words appear plural in the subtitle of the book as there are different levels and modes caracterizing those three major instances, and in a way as many as there are different individual spectators (also male or female).NOTE: This is a six-week intensive seminar meeting twice a week for three hours each meeting. April 18-May 25, 2016.

This course examines the western movie genre through the lens of what is thought of as the cinema’s special relationship to and place within twentieth century modernity. From the beginnings of narrative cinema through the 1960s, more westerns were made than any other genre, and the iconography and ideology of the western influenced not only other film genres but also spilled over into other aspects of popular culture and even high art. Why was the cinema, the medium that exemplified modernity for so many people around the world, dominated by westerns, a genre set in the past and in the wilderness? How did the western manifest aspects, anxieties, possibilities, and widespread phenomena of twentieth century modernity? We will examine the western’s intersection with modern phenomena, activities, and artforms including tourism, abstract expressionism, feminism, the Baby Boom & television, toys, mining and atomic energy and weapons, and the rise of Las Vegas as a hub for recreational gambling. Written texts will include contemporaneous film reviews and scholarship by the likes of Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Warshow, Bosley Crowther, and others. We will also pay special attention to contemporaneous scholarship on the emerging white-collar class and conformist culture, which westerns provided an alternative and respite from. Scholars will include Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and William Whyte. We will watch mostly mainstream Hollywood westerns, by John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Andre de Toth, Delmer Daves, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, and others, but independent films, cartoons, television shows, and films set in the present day will also be consulted.

Controversies fuel American politics and culture. One hundred years ago, Intolerance shook the world, if not the most famous, then the most the most expensive and seminal movie ever made. One hundred and one, The Birth of a Nation generated the loudest controversy on the issue of race; at the same time, its powerful suspense sequence in the finale made this movie a fundamental of action-movie filmmaking for the century to come. Griffith came to movie industry in 1908 and dropped out of it in 1931. This course offers a quarter-of-a-century vast panorama of inventions and innovations, shames and triumphs, brilliant successes and spectacular failures connected with D.W. Griffith, the most famous pioneer in the history of film.

This course explores affinities between new media forms and technologies (e.g., digital cinema, video games, streamable television, fitness trackers, smartphone apps) and contemporary science and medicine (e.g., infectious disease, noninvasive surgical procedures, drug addiction treatment). How do new media represent scientific processes and expertise? What are the particular habits and patterns produces by new media technologies? And how do they affect medical research methods and practice? Readings and screenings draw from across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and range from scholarly works to news articles, blog posts, videos, and mobile apps. Students will be asked to analyze, operate, and play with scientific new media. Central texts include recent science-driven films, like Contagion and The Martian, virtual dissection and surgical training smartphone apps, and pandemic games Infection and Bio Inc. The variety of activities will ask students to question the many ways in which new media respond to and shape scientific and medical research—and vice-versa.

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.

As a stylistic device, the long take has long been a definitive feature of art cinema, being particularly conspicuous in filmmakers who make ethical and even metaphysical claims for their “slow cinema.” After surveying the use of the long take in silent and classical cinema (including Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock), we will concentrate on the long-take style that spanned the art cinemas of Western Europe (Michelangelo Antonioni, Chantal Akerman), Russia and Eastern Europe (Miklós Jancsó, Andrei Tarkovsky), and Central Eurasia (Ebrahim Golestan). We will then consider its influence on contemporary art cinema, from Aleksandr Sokurov and Béla Tarr to Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman). Along the way we will also consider the long-take style in documentary cinema, and will also consider the links between long-take cinema and certain tendencies in video art, exemplified by the work in video of Sharon Lockhart and James Benning. We will close by considering the feature films of artists Steve McQueen and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Treating long-take style as a distinct approach to cinematic realism, in each case we will evaluate the claims made for the ethical, metaphysical and even political valences of the long take, with readings by filmmakers and by theorists from Henri Bergson and André Bazin to Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Laura Mulvey and beyond.

This course explores political documentary film, its intersection with historical and cultural events, its relationship to the State, as well as its opposition to Hollywood and traditional media.  We will examine how various documentary modes of representation produce meaning, and how films express themselves a political. The relationship between the filmmaker, film subject and audience will be considered.  How political documentaries are disseminated and hopefully become part of political struggle will be a major theme.  The course will concentrate on political documentary film in the U.S. after WWII.

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.Open only to non-CMS majors. May not count toward a CMS major. 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.Open only to non-CMS majors. May not count toward a CMS major. 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.Open only to non-CMS majors. May not count toward a CMS major. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical and visual arts.