Spring

This course will introduce students to Latin American film studies through an assessment of its most critically celebrated period of radical filmmaking. The New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) of the late 1950s-70s generated unprecedented international enthusiasm for Latin American film production. The filmmakers of this loosely designated movement were defining themselves in relation to global realist film traditions like Italian Neorealism and Griersonian documentary, in relation to--mostly failed-- experiments in building Hollywood-style national film industries, and in relation to regional discourses of underdevelopment and mestizaje. Since the late 1990s, a reassessment of the legacy of the NLAC has been taking shape as scholars have begun to interrogate its canonical status in the face of a changed political climate.  In the sphere of filmmaking, contemporary Latin American new wave cinemas are also grappling with that legacy-sometimes disavowing it, sometimes appropriating it. We will situate the NLAC in its historical context, survey its formal achievements and political aspirations, assess its legacy, and take stock of the ways and the reasons that it haunts contemporary production.

The uncanny is an experience or quality that by definition remains difficult to grasp; something that is mysterious and enigmatic, yet also seems oddly familiar.  It is an atmosphere, mood or perhaps a theme that movies have explores since nearly the beginning of cinema (or perhaps even before…) To explore this term this class will draw largely on a tradition of commentary on the German word Das Unheimliche, usually translated as uncanny, that can be traced among Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger and its relevance to film studies. Freud and his disciple Otto Rank before 1920 related the uncanny to the cinema, and cinema’s ability to evoke the uncanny has been frequently observed. On the one hand, the cinema’s ability to portray uncanny events (as in Rank and Freud’s invocation of the 1913 film the Student in Prague) appears generically in films of fantasy or horror. In addition, some theorists have felt that film as a medium could be best approached via the uncanny. In this class, we will read a series of the key texts and try to survey the terrain of the concept of the uncanny. We will screen films that evoke the experience through their narrative and stylistics, and we will discuss the usefulness of the term for theorizing both film and electronic media, both new and old.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.

Description coming soon.

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.

Crowd, Audience, Spectator: these three terms or concepts have been central to the understanding, theorization, and study of cinema since the pre-narrative era of the cinema of attractions (1895-1907). In this class, we will examine the fundamental literature, both historical and theoretical, on these topics as they span the history of the field, and as they also introduce the related concepts of mass culture, the public sphere, identification, female/queer/black/resistant spectatorship, among others. While the class will additionally provide the student with methodological skills for researching audiences and film receptions, we will also consider concepts such as the mob and mob violence; the politics, theory, and aesthetics of assembly; uprisings; and occupations. In this way, this class will consider material and questions from the silent film period to our contemporary moment in political life and experience beyond, but also including, the cinema.

The primary aim of the course is to investigate the theories and practices of documentary film in Japan. Spanning the 1920s to the present, we will engage in rigorous examination of the transformations of cinematic forms and contents, and of the social, cultural and political elements bound up with those transformations. We will also juxtapose aspects of Japanese documentary film with global movements, and wider theories of documentary and non-fiction. Each week we will engage with theoretical or analytical readings, through which we will explore: 1) how particular ethics and politics are imbricated in various documentary modes and genres; 2) the specific cases of Japanese documentaries and their styles/techniques; and 3) the way these films and film movements measure them against today’s media regime (and how they can be understood in light of that regime). Last, another thread will look at the various traces of Japanese documentary filmmaking practice that have had an impact on other filmmakers and national cinemas, from works by Chris Marker, Abbas Kiarostami and Wim Wenders to recent independent documentaries in East Asia. To locate such traces in the transnational framework, the final sections of the course will be devoted to China’s new documentary film movement since the 1990s and contemporary Taiwanese documentaries.

This seminar will examine how twentieth-century filmmakers and artists have deployed form and formal experiment to engage not simply politics, but the visual, discursive, and material field of political life and experience. While our study will broadly proceed by way of a study of techniques such as collage, montage, and photomontage; the diagram, the readymade, and appropriation; realism and materiality; and event-based and urban-geographical strategies, we will also engage several philosophical texts on the subject, namely, Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. Consequently, our study will advance a discussion about the dialectical relationship between "form" and "aesthetics," while we will also interrogate the evolution of "politcial subjectivity" and its modes of being and expression in twentieth-century film, art, and life. Additionally, this seminar is designed to coincide with and complement the yearlong project "Concrete Happenings" in the Department of Art History, and the associated symposium on "Fluxus and Film" that will take place in the spring term.

This course is a comparative examination of screen melodrama. The first part of the course will offer an overview of the critical literature on melodrama and a survey of significant film melodramas from around the world. In the second part of the course, we will narrow our focus to melodramas from the two regions: the United States and Latin America. The conceit of the course is to put different regional traditions of melodrama into conversation. In addition to offering a basic orientation, the class will also test the boundaries of the category in our work on the racial melodrama and the conjuncture of documentary form and melodrama.  Other topics will include melodrama as a mode and as a genre; melodrama and national allegory; melodrama and revolution; melodrama and realism; melodrama and emotion; melodrama and the temporally displaced spectator.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the class will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies.Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email tcomerford@uchicago.edu with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience. Enrollment priority will be given to graduate and undergraduate CMS students, beginning with seniors, then to DoVA graduates and undergraduates, then to students in other departments. Those students receiving permission should bring add slips to be signed in on the first day of class.

This course will survey the detective genre from its origins in the silent serial film through its development in film noir and neo-noir as well as its transformation in what is often called Metaphysical Detective films which explore the limits of the genre.