Spring

The ancient and multivalent image of the underground has crystallized over the last two centuries to denote sites of disaffection from-and strategies of resistance to-dominant social, political and cultural systems. We will trace the development of this metaphor from the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s and the French Resistance during World War II to the Weather Underground in the 1960s-1970s, while also considering it as a literary and artistic concept, from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Ellison's Invisible Man to Chris Marker's film La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Alongside with such literary and cinematic tales, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Guy Debord, this course investigates how countercultural spaces become-or fail to become-sites of political resistance, and also how dissenting ideologies give rise to countercultural spaces. We ask about the relation between social deviance (the failure to meet social norms, whether willingly or unwittingly) and political resistance, especially in the conditions of late capitalism and neo-colonialism, when countercultural literature, film and music (rock, punk, hip-hop, DIY aesthetics etc.) get absorbed into-and coopted by-the hegemonic socio-economic system. In closing we will also consider contemporary forms of dissidence-from Pussy Riot to Black Lives Matter-that rely both on the vulnerability of individual bodies and global communication networks.

This seminar explores what might be encountered under the categories of “Blackness” and “audio-visuality” with an emphasis on African-American and Black diasporic audio-visual culture. We will consider a range of studies of “Blackness” produced in English in the areas of African American and Black Studies, cinema and media studies, performance studies, art history, and visual studies.

This seminar explores the emergence of film theory during the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Part of the aim is historiographic: to look at accounts of how and why something called Film Theory emerged in the wake of a set of intellectual, political, and institutional forces. The main focus of the seminar, however, will be to create an alternate approach to a set of questions that—as the recent resurgence of work on Film Theory show—have not gone away, and also to pick up a set of questions and topics that got left by the wayside. We’ll examine the idea that film theory arose in these years as a struggle over the legacy and meaning of modernism, especially an inheritance of modernist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the central ideas to be explored is that the line between theory and criticism was extremely porous in this period, and that film theory emerged out of a sustained dialogue with debates in art history. The seminar will trace three strands of film theory that laid claim to different modernist traditions: one exemplified by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried; a second by Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss; and a third by Peter Wollen and what has been called “Screen Theory.” Readings will position central texts from these strands of theory alongside their modernist influences, from Cubism to Duchamp to Dada to Benjamin to Brecht. The debates between major journals of the time, including Art Forum, October, and Screen, will be central to this history. Screenings will focus on work from Classical Hollywood, the rise of global new waves, and the American avant-garde.

This seminar will present a critical survey of the principal authors, concepts, and films in the classical period of film theory.  The main though not exclusive emphasis will be the period of silent film and theorists writing in the context of French and German cinema. We will study the aesthetic debates of the period in their historical context, whose central questions include: Is film an art?  If so, what specific and autonomous means of expression define it as an aesthetic medium?  What defines the social force and function of cinema as a mass art? Weekly readings and discussion will examine major film movements of the classical period—for example, French impressionism and Surrealism—as well as the work of major figures such as Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Béla Balázs, Erwin Panofsky, Hans Richter, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, and others.

Cinema offers almost endless ways of telling one’s own story—diaries, confessions, album, travelogues, accounts of a distressing period, letters, searches for one’s origins, autobiographies, self-portraits, work notes, autofictions—and filmmakers continually create new hybrid forms that innovate or transgress former “genres.” This seminar examines film history’s various modes of autobiographical discourse in the context of philosophical and psychoanalytic considerations of the self as well as of experiments in literary and pictorial self-representation.

This production-focused class will fashion new creative tactics of defiance and resilience for our Spring 2020 remote learning quarter. 

Surveying the damage wrought, and the new opportunities submerged, by the sudden shift to online performance and interaction, while marshaling enough history and theory to guide our practice though this necessarily experimental time, this class will investigate such timely topics and technologies such as: hacking Zoom, interactive escape rooms on Twitch, distributed music jamming, internet-augmented performance spaces and surely a few new media that emerge as we go. Students will propose, critique, reverse-engineer and workshop projects that forge new paths online. While programming experience (Python, Javascript, GLSL and web development) or media production experience (video, sound design and music) are useful they are not prerequisites for this course.

In this unique class for this unique time, students will work towards building projects and ideas potentially integrated into A Labyrinth — the forthcoming spring 2020 online project made by The Fourcasters — with the possibility of placing their work in interaction with the whole University of Chicago community.

This course will screen and discuss films made mostly by Chicagoans, concentrating on the period after WWII, until 1980 when Hollywood began using Chicago as a location. By examining various genres, including those not normally interrogated by academics, such as educational and industrial films, we will consider whether there is a Chicago style of filmmaking. Technological advances that enabled both film and video to escape the restrictions of the studio and go hand-held, into city streets and homes, will be discussed.  If there is a Chicago style of filmmaking, one must look at the landscape of the city—the design, the politics, the cultures and labor of its people and how they live their lives.  The protagonists and villains of Chicago stories 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.  

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the 1960s to the 2000s. The continued development of film style and form over this period — one of seismic changes in audio-visual aesthetics — will be one of the primary themes of the course. Additionally, lectures and discussions will wrestle with the rise of global film cultures, technological innovations and their effects on style (such as post-magnetic sound, and visual effects techniques), major international directors and the solidification of auteurism as both a commercial and aesthetic imperative, the increasing internationalization of Hollywood, and post-1970s genre reorientation elevating horror, science-fiction, and other genres to the highest levels of mainstream respectability, critical appraisal, and/or commercial success. Screenings are mandatory and include work by filmmakers including Pedro Almodovar, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Federico Fellini, Hollis Frampton, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cristian Mungiu, and more, in addition to a selection of music videos.

This seminar will be devoted to close reading of Miriam Hansen’s path-breaking book, Cinema and Experience. As the most influential exponent of Critical Theory in cinema and media studies, we will discuss Hansen’s major contributions to the field, including her important reassessments of concepts of the public sphere and experience, modernity and mass culture, aesthetics and politics, the play-form of second nature, utopia and counter-utopia, and alternative accounts of spectatorship among others. We will also read in parallel and discuss the major texts of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer that are the basis of her unique reconstruction of Critical Theory as a philosophy of cinema, photography, and visual culture.

This course will allow students to continue working on projects begun in the Intro to 16mm Production course (or developing a new small-scale project), in addition to developing skills with the following: sophisticated approaches to cinematography (comparative and reflective light metering, color negative exposure); varying workflows for post-production editing (analog and digital); and sound recording and design. Students will meet as a group for lectures, technical demonstrations and a shooting workshop. Course meeting time will also be set aside for individual conferences with the instructor to address project development and completion. Students should expect to budget between 120.00-500.00 for their filmstock and processing costs, depending on the project. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Instructor permission required.

Permission from instructor is required for registration. Students will bid for entry to the class by emailing tcomerford@uchicago.edu, listing their year, major and previous production experience. Priority will be given to students who have previously completed the Intro to 16mm course, followed by CMS and DOVA majors, from graduate students to first-years. Students whose bids are accepted will be registered officially by the instructor at the first class meeting.