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Graduate Program | Graduate Courses || Recent Courses | Dissertations || Undergrad Courses | Undergrad Program || Summer Courses
Below are descriptions for courses in the graduate program in Cinema and Media Studies (CMS). For further work in Cinema and Media Studies, students are also encouraged to investigate other courses taught by the Resource Faculty. Film screenings add three to four hours per week to class time for the majority of courses. Please note: This page is updated only periodically; for the most accurate, up-to-date information, consult the Registrar's online timeschedules.
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Course Number | Instructor | Quarter
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33000. Neorealism: Space, Culture, History.
Following the traumatic devastations of Fascism, the physical and moral collapse of World War II, filmmakers such as Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica (to cite only the most famous) offered the most immediate and influential responses to reconstruction of postwar Europe. Neorealism thus became a model for the renewal of cinemas everywhere, binding a new ethic and aesthetic of filmmaking in ways that remain exemplary for other nations and minorities to this day. In its renewed exploration of space and location, temporality and history, neorealism was also a central reference for artists, architects, and writers. This course will interlace key neorealist feature films with lesser known works, including documentaries and shorts, offering fresh perspectives on one of the most influential movements in film history. All readings in English. N. Steimatsky. Autumn.
38920. Introduction to Film Production. (=CMST 28920, ARTV 23850/33850, HMRT 25102/35102)
This intensive laboratory will be an introduction to 16mm film production, experimenting with various film stocks and basic lighting designs. The class will be organized around a series of production situations and students will work in crews. Each crew will learn to operate and maintain the 16mm Bolex film camera, tripod; Arri lights, gels, diffusion, and grip equipment. The final project will be an in camera edit. No prerequisites. Lab fee $100. J. Hoffman. Autumn.
40000. Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies. (=ARTH 39900, ENGL 48000, MAPH 33000)
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. J. Wild. Autumn.
41500. Perception and Understand of Multimedia (CDIN 51500, MUSI 45010, PSYC 41501).
In light of the proliferation of film, television, and recently the internet, this course investigates the perception and understanding of multimedia and their effect on cultural production and social relations. The course offers an introduction to empirical research on multimedia in social and cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which will be considered in conjunction with critical issues of multimedia research in the humanities. Participants will conduct an actual empirical study, preferably as a collaboration between participants from the humanities and the social sciences. Topics may include the role of attention, memory, emotion, and value judgment in multimedia and their relation to complex manifestations of social behavior, such as artistic production, advertisement, and journalism. A recurring theme of the course will be the relationship between sound and image. To enable empirical research, ten seminar sessions will be spread out over the entire academic year, with five introductory sessions in the fall quarter, three sessions devoted to the preparation of pilot studies in the winter quarter, and two final sessions discussing results of the actual experiments in the spring quarter. Participants should come away from the course with the understanding and experience that it is possible and productive to combine critical methods in the humanities with the empirical approaches in the natural and social sciences. B. Hoeckner. Autumn.
48402. STYLES OF PERFORMANCE AND EXPRESSION FROM STAGE TO SCREEN (CMLT 40900, SLAV 48402).
This seminar will focus on the history of acting styles in silent film (1895-1930) mapping "national" styles of acting that emerged during the 1910s (American, Danish, Italian, Russian) and various "acting schools" that proliferated during the 1920s ("Expressionist acting," "Kuleshov's workshop," etc). We will discuss film acting in the context of stage acting: its history from the 17th to 20th century, its theories and systems (Delsarte, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold) and in the context of fine arts. We will also look at various theories of impact (empathy, identification, etc) and at some influential texts in the history of performance (Diderot, Coquelin, Kleist). Y. Tsivian. Autumn.
48500. History of International Cinema, Part I, Silent Era. (=CMST 28500, ARTH 28500/38500, CMLT 22400/32400, COVA 26500, ENGL 29300/48700, MAPH 33600)
PQ: 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. J. Lastra. Autumn.
51300. Race, Media, and Visual Culture (=CDIN 51300, ARTH 49309, ENGL 51300,).
This seminar will explore the question of race, racism, and racial identity across a variety of media and social practices, including photography and cinema, visual art and literature, and the iconology of everyday life. The seminar will provide a twin introduction to the fundamentals of visual cultural theory and media studies, on the one hand, and racial theory on the “other.” The study of racial theory will converge with issues of visuality, mediation, and iconology, particularly the question of stereotype and caricature, the role of fantasy and the imaginary in racist perception, and its reproduction and critique in various form of visual art and media. Sponsored by the Center for Disciplinary Innovation (CDI), the seminar will combine methodologies from art history, literary criticism, visual and media studies, as well as anthropology. D. English; W.J.T. Mitchell. Autumn.
30101. Women Mystery Writers: From Page to Screen. (=GNDR 30202)
Many distinguished filmmakers have found inspiration in mystery novels written by women. In this course we shall read novels by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), Ruth Rendell (Tree of Hands, The Bridesmaid, Live Flesh), and, time permitting, Laura by Vera Caspary, Bunny Lake is Missing by Evelyn Piper, and Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong, and we shall analyze the films based on these novels, directed by such luminaries as Hitchcock. Chabrol, Caviani, Clément, Wenders, Almodóvar, Preminger, and others. Among topics of particular interest are: techniques of film adaptation; transnational dislocations from page to screen; the problematics of gender; and the transformations of "voice" understood both literally and mediatically. R. West. Winter.
31900. American Cinema Since 1960.
The year 1960 is commonly understood as a watershed in United States film history, marking the end of the so-called "classical" Hollywood cinema. We will discuss this assumption in terms of the break-up of the studio system; the erosion of the Production Code; the crisis of audience precipitated by televisionÕs mass spread; and the changing modes of film reception, production, and style under the impact of video, cable, and other electronic communication technologies. We will also relate cinema to social and political issues of the post-1960s period (Civil Rights, student and women's movements, the Vietnam war, urban crisis, reproductive freedom, AIDS, the Reagan/Bush era, and the end of the Cold War) and ask how films reflected upon and intervened in contested areas of public and private experience. With the help of the concept of "genre" (and the changed "genericity" of 1980s and '90s films) and of the notion of "national cinema" (usually applied to film traditions other than the United States), we will attempt a dialogue between industrial/stylistic and cultural-studies approaches to film history. Autumn. M. Hansen.
33001. From La Dolce Vita to the Murder of Pasolini.
This course explores an intensely productive, stormy, even delirious period in Italian film culture between 1960 and 1975. In that era the material and social transformations effected by the economic boom, the marketing of Italy’s luxury image, the student movements, and the rise of left and right wing terrorism provoked some of the richest, most innovative work by such filmmakers as Antonioni, Pasolini, Bellocchio, Leone, among others. This Italian “New Wave,” distinct from its French counterpart, responded to a host of political and cultural imperatives through new visions of urban space, of social and sexual mores, the relation of “high” and “low,” and revisitations of the past both near and distant. These and related questions bound up with film culture and aesthetics we shall discuss in light of both monumental and lesser-known works. All readings in English. N. Steimatsky. Winter.
33903. Creative Thesis Seminar. (=ARTV 23904/33904)
This seminar will focus on how to craft a creative thesis in film or video. Works-in-progress will be screened each week, and technical and structural issues relating to the work will be explored. The seminar will also develop the written portion of the creative thesis. The class is limited to seniors from CMS and DOVA, and MAPH students working on a creative thesis. J. Hoffman. Winter.
34909. The East Asian Film Musical. (EALC 24907/34907)
The film musical appears as a quintessentially American form. From the development of the genre in synchronization with early sound technology to its full efflorescence in the MGM Broadway adaptations of the 1950s, nothing spoke the capital intensity of hallywood and the ideology of Americanism more clearly than the musical. This course studies East Asian emulation of Hollywood’s “transmedia exploitation” of popular music, revues, and musical films but also the musical that blazed regional circuits through East Asia, from “oriental jazz” and the wartime films of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Ri Ko-Ran to postwar Toho travelogues and contemporary films featuring East Asian pop stars. Main focus on Japan; also films from Hong Kong, Manchuria, and Taiwan. M. Raine. Winter.
37800. Theories of Media. (=CMST 27800, ARTH 25900/35900, DOVA 25400, ENGL 12800/32800, ISHU 21800, MAPH 32800).
PQ: Any 10000-level ARTH or DOVA course, or consent of instructor. This course explores the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media but also at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices and a habitat in which images proliferate and take on a “life of their own.” Readings include classic texts (e.g., Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle’s Poetics); and modern texts (e.g., Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Regis Debray’s Mediology, Friedrich Kittler’s Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter). W. J. T. Mitchell. Winter.
38000. Documentary Video. (=CMST 28000, ARTV 23901)
This course focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of direct cinema, cinéma vérité, the essay, ethnographic film, the diary and self-reflexive cinema, historical and biographical film, agitprop/activist forms, and guerilla television are screened and discussed. Topics include the ethics and politics of representation and the shifting lines between fact and fiction. Labs explore video pre-production, camera, sound, and editing. Students develop an idea for a documentary video; form crews; and produce, edit, and screen a five-minute documentary. A two-hour lab is required in addition to class time. Lab fee $50. J. Hoffman. Winter.
43002. The Face on Film.
The seminar will discuss on the workings of the face –as imprint of identity, as figure of subjectivity, as privileged object of representation, as mode and ethic of address – through film theory and practice. How has cinema responded to the mythic and iconic charge of the face, to the portrait’s exploration of model and likeness, identity and identification, the revelatory and masking play of expression, the symbolic and social registers informing the human countenance. At this intersection of archaic desires and contemporary anxieties, the face will serve as our medium by which to reconsider, in the cinematic arena, some of the oldest questions on the image. Among the filmmakers and writers who will inform our discussion are Balázs, Epstein, Kuleshov, Dreyer, Pasolini, Hitchcock, Warhol, Bresson, Bazin, Barthes, Doane, Aumont, Nancy, Didi-Huberman, and others. N. Steimatsky. Winter.
50200. Seminar: Catharsis and other Aesthetic Responses. (=ENGL 59304, CMST 50200).
This PhD seminar examines the ramifications of catharsis and other responses to texts and images, in other words it investigates the relationship between effect and affect. Beginning with Aristotle and present day responses to catharsis, we will investigate the kinds of aesthetic response invoked by tragic drama and theory (esp Hegel), realism (Lukacs, Bazin and Brecht), as well as theories of pleasure (Barthes, Derrida), judgment (Kant, Bourdieu) and boredom (Spacks). We will conclude with a test case, exploring the potential and limitations of catharsis as an appropriate response to the literary and cinematic representation of trauma in and after the Argentine ‘dirty war.’ An essential part of the discussion will be the problem of translating key terms, not only from one language to another but also from one theoretical discourse and/or medium to another. This seminar is the second required core course for ComLit PhDs. PQ for other humanities PhDs: ACTIVE working knowledge of at least one of the following: French, German, (classical) Greek or Spanish. Loren Kruger. Winter.
68702. CINEMA POST-CINEMA (ENGL 67802).
As the emergence of new media has been dislodging cinema from the central position it held in public culture throughout most of the twentieth century, and as digital technologies play an ever greater role in the production and dissemination of films, some critics are referring to the present era as “post-cinematic.” Likewise, in celebrations of a new “convergence culture,” cinema is said to be disappearing into a larger stream of audiovisual media. In this seminar, we will discuss such claims by tracing some of the developments and changes that would support them, along with the rhetoric that mounts them. At the same time, we will ask whether there are salient features that continue to distinguish cinema as a sensory-perceptual regime and aesthetic dispositif, associated with particular forms of experience and publicness, even as the above developments have significantly destabilized the institution and not least have affected the way we approach film history. Finally, we will look at examples of hybrid forms of moving-image practice that have evolved in contemporary art as well as new film cultures all over the world (e.g. China, Nigeria), in the context of political and social movements and alternative modes of distribution and venues. Readings include texts by Shaviro, Jenkins, Manovich, Rodowick, Doane, Rosen, Gunning, Mulvey, Sobchack, Kinder, Galloway, Chun, Kirschenbaum, Bellour, Larkin, and Zhang Zhen. MA students by permission of instructor only. M. Hansen. Winter.
34906. Cinema in Wartime Japan and its Territories (EALC 44905)
This seminar explores the history of cinema as a new medium for "propaganda and agitation" in the context of Japan's wars in Asia and the Pacific, 1937-1945. We will study Japanese films as part of a global 1930s "illiberal modernism" while simultaneously exploring more local sources of wartime cinema, in the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde, and the broader image culture of wartime Japan. We will also explore how the medium was deployed in Japan's colonies (Taiwan and Korea), client states (Manchuria), and occupied territories (Eastern China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc). English will be the lingua-franca for the course but there will also be opportunities to read primary and secondary Japanese documents, and materialin other languages. No Asian language requirement, but there will be Japanese and other non-English readings for students with appropriate language skills. M. Raine. Spring.
34907. Japanese New Wave Cinema, 1955-1973 EALC 24908/34908 (=cmst 24907/34907)
This course surveys the rise and fall of alternatives to studio cinema in Japan between the 1950s and the 1970s. The concept of a "new wave" is notoriously imprecise: rather than shared stylistic attributes or political programs, the films are best understood as linked in a loose "culture of authenticity" that opposed the jokey emulation of foreign forms in the studio cinema's "culture of the copy." Topics include the Nikkatsu and Shochiku new waves, union-based oppositional cinema, experimental film-making, radical documentary, Cahier's style auteurs, the Shochiku new wave, experimental theatre, the Shinjuku and Shibuya film-theatre subcultures, and the institutional roles of the Sogetsu Art Center and the Art Theatre Guild. No knowledge of Japanese is required: separate section for discussion of Japanese sources. M. Raine. Spring.
38001. Documentary Video: Production Techniques. (=CMST 28001, ARTV 23902, HMRT 25103/35103)
PQ: ARTV 23901 or consent of instructor. This course focuses on the shaping and crafting of a nonfiction video. Students are expected to write a treatment detailing their project. Production techniques focus on the handheld camera versus tripod, interviewing and microphone placement, and lighting for the interview. Post-production covers editing techniques and distribution strategies. Students then screen final projects in a public space. Lab fee $50. J. Hoffman. Spring.
41900. Seeing/Writing the Everyday in 20th-Century France.
France in the twentieth century saw a proliferation of discourses on everyday life, as well as efforts to represent daily reality using literary and cinematographic means. Early on, the rise of the cinema effected a vast transformation of the perception of everyday objects and experience; shortly after, the avant-garde’s ambition to transform life through art entailed the critique of a contemporary reality perceived as debased, and the re-imagining of the spaces and gestures of ordinary existence. After World War II, interdisciplinary efforts to theorize the everyday enter into dialogue with cinematic, literary, and artistic works. Through the study of key literary, cinematic, and theoretical works, we will reflect on and define a set of categories and concepts that will assist our study of the political, aesthetic, and epistemological ambiguity and resonance of the everyday. Topics for discussion will include modernism and urban experience, the spaces and the politics of everyday life, avant-gardism and the transformation of the ordinary, and the relationship of fiction and documentary. Authors and filmmakers may include: Aragon, Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Certeau, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Rouch, Debord, Ackerman, Marker. The course will be taught in English, with an option to do readings and written assignments in French. Screenings are mandatory. A. James. J. Wild. Spring.
44203. Before and After Beckett: Theater and Film.
Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleakness but his experiments with theatre and film echo the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and film including Chaplin and Keaton) as well as the artistic avant-garde (Dreyer in film; Jarry and Artaud in theatre). This course will juxtapose this early twentieth century work with Beckett’s plays on stage and screen, and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Duras) and successors. Contemporary authors will depend on availability but may include Vinaver, Minyana, Lagarce in France, Pinter, Greenaway in the UK; Foreman, Wellman in the US. Theoretical work may include texts by Artaud, Barthes, Derrida, Josette Feral, Peggy Phelan, Bert States and others. Working knowledge of French would be very helpful but is not absolutely required. L. Kruger. Spring.
48600. History of International Cinema, Part II, Sound Cinema to 1960 (=CMST 28600/48600, ArtH 28600/38600, ENGL 29600/48900, MAPH 33700).
PQ: This is the second part of the international survey history of film covering the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly recommended that students take the first section first. This survey will deal with issues of film form, industry organization and film culture during three decades, focusing on the crystallization of the Classical Hollywood Film as a key issue. But international alternatives to Hollywood will also be discussed, from the unique forms of Japanese cinema to movements like Italian Neo-realism and the beginnings of the New Wave in France. Film style, from the classical scene break down to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting) will form the center of the course, while attention will also be paid to the development of a film culture. Texts will include Bordwell and Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, Godard and others. Screenings will include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir. Y. Tsivian. Spring.
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