2017-2018

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 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 course will be fully remote.

This course takes the modern horror film as its object.  For the purposes of this class, modern horror spans the period from 1960 to the present, although much of our attention will be directed toward the period form the 1980s to the present.  We will examine key problems in the genre including, but not limited to an examination of the nature of the horrific, close formal analysis (which typically is neglected in favor of more culturally oriented approaches), questions of POV and camera movement, the articulation and construction of space, the role of gender in the genre, the changing importance of women as performers, characters, directors, and spectators, found footage/surveillance, and the genre’s address to the viewer.

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.

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.

This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We will discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.

The course looks at Chaplin and his long film career from a number of perspectives. One of these is Chaplin’s acting technique inherited from commedia dell’arte and enriched by cinematic devices; another is Chaplin as a person involved in a series of political and sexual scandals; yet another one is Chaplin as a myth fashioned within twentieth-century art movements like German Expressionist poetry, French avant-garde painting, or Soviet Constructivist art.Prerequisite(s): CMST 10100 Introduction to Film or consent of instructor.

This course explores Ozu Yasujiro’s works from both national and transnational perspectives. Through an intense examination of Ozu’s robust filmmaking career, from the student comedies of the late 1920s to the family dramas (in Agfacolor) of the early 1960s, we will locate Ozu’s works at a dialogic focal point of Japanese, East Asian, American and European cinema.

This seminar explores the intersection of film and philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetics has become a curiously central topic not only within cinema and media studies but also in the disciplines that surround it. From speculative realists to critical theorists to political theorists of various stripes; aesthetics have been taken to have methodological and conceptual primacy. This course takes several paths to explore and evaluate these accounts. First, it looks at the question of why aesthetics has emerged in the present situation: what unresolved questions or problems does it respond to? What is its appeal for the current state of politics and media? Second, it places the recent debates within a longer history of philosophical aesthetics. Which resources from this tradition are being drawn on—and, of equal importance, which are not? Last, the course examines the usefulness of aesthetics within cinema and media studies by testing it against the details of film form. To this end, we will look at several key moments in the history and theory of montage to see whether aesthetics can provide new insights.

In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as “counter-terrorism” that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of “post-truth” dominated by “corporate-media,” “fake news,” and “fact-challenged” journalism. Taking this contemporary platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality within their discursive purview; and have also deployed concepts of gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media— broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet— have aimed to “counter” patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality, while also discussing how media discourses of truth and non-truth have been historically constructed and deployed (documentary; propaganda). This class will also function as a research laboratory, where students will be asked to track, evaluate, and theorize contemporary or historical media that situate gender and sexuality within a so-called “media war,” or in their construction and dissemination of “truth” and/or resistance.  

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video.  Examples of Direct Cinema, Cinéma Vérité, the Essay, Ethnographic film, the Diary, Historical and Biographical film, Agitprop/Activist forms, and Guerilla Television, will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the documentary genre, such as the ethics and politics of representation and the shifting lines between documentary fact and fiction will be explored. Pre-production strategies and production techniques will be taught, including the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing.  Students will be expected to purchase a portable firewire. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are encouraged to take Doc. Production II to complete their work.