Below are descriptions for courses in the undergraduate concentration 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.

28201.  Political Documentary Film. (=CMST 38201, COVA 28204/38204) 

This course explores the political documentary film, its intersection with historical and cultural events, and its opposition to Hollywood and traditional media.  We will examine various documentary modes of production, from films with a social message, to advocacy and activist film, to counter-media and agit-prop.  We will also consider the relationship between the filmmaker, film subject and audience, and how political documentaries are disseminated and, most importantly, part of political struggle.  J. Hoffman.  Spring.

28920. Introduction to Film Production. (=CMST 38920, ARTV 23850/33850)

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.

24606. China’s New Documentary Cinema.  (=CMST 34607, EALC )

Since the early 1990s, the “new documentary” has emerged as one of the most prominent phenomena in Chinese film and video, widely circulating at international film festivals and eliciting considerable critical debate. This course examines the styles and functions of China’s “new documentary” over the last fifteen years, paying particular attention to the institutional, cultural, economic, and political conditions that underpin its flourishing. This overview will lead us to consider questions that concern the recent explosion of the documentary form worldwide, and to explore the tensions and imbalances that characterize the global circulation of the genre. We will address such issues as: what is “new” about China’s recent documentary cinema; the “national” and “transnational” dimensions of documentary filmmaking, and the ways in which these dimensions intersect in its production and circulation; the extent to which the international demand for “unofficial” images from China has contributed to its growth; the politics involved in documentary filmmaking, and the forms and meanings of “independent” cinema in the wake of intensified globalization; the links between Chinese documentary and the global rise of documentary filmmaking, and the ways in which they challenge extant concepts and theorizations of the genre.  P. Iovene. Winter.

24201.  Cinema in Africa. (=CMST 34201, ENGL 27600/37600)

This course examines cinema in Africa as well as films produced in Africa.  It places cinema in Sub-Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV.  We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted with a South African film, The Magic Garden (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995).  The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film.  L. Kruger.  Winter.

10100.  Introduction to Film I. (=ARTH 20000, ARTV 25300, ENGL 10800, ISHU 20000)

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.  J. Lastra. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

26802.  Buñuel and Surrealism.

Description Coming Soon.  J. Lastra.  Winter.

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: CMST 10100 must be take before or concurrently with this course.  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.

24606. Early Chinese Cinema.  (CMST 44606, EALC 24502/35402)

This course explores the rich history of Chinese cinema from the earliest extant films of the 1920s to the end of the Republican Era (and beginning of Communist rule) in 1949. Topics to be covered include influences on early Chinese film ranging from traditional Chinese drama to contemporary Hollywood productions, the effects of leftist politics on commercial cinema, and the Chinese star system and material film culture. Film styles and genres examined include traditional narratives, slapstick comedy, social realism, horror, romantic comedy, and a proto Chinese art cinema, but in every case the focus will be on what the films tell us about the experience of modernity in China and the ways artists and audiences used cinema to both reflect and intervene in the conditions of their lives under semi-colonial capitalism in the period leading up to Communism. J. McGrath. Autumn.

25504.  American Horror Film.

Description Coming Soon.  C. Sayad. Spring.

27200.  Slavic Critical Theory from Jakobson to Zizek.  (=CMST 37200, SLAV 28500/38500, ISHU 21300/31300). 

This seminar-style course surveys the cultural and literary theory of critics including Roman Jakobson, the Russian Formalists, Jan Mukarovsky, the Prague School, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Julie Kristeva, Mikhail Epstein, Slavoj Zizek, and the Slovenian Lacanians.  M. Sternstein.  Spring.

28701. Video 1 - content development.  (=ARTVPQ: 23803/33803)

PQ:ARTV 10100 or 10200 or consent of instructor. Course offers introduction to the expression of content through the medium of video. Students develop sources and scripts for works that are exchanged and produced and then exchanged again and edited. Basics of camera operation, lighting and non-linear editing are covered throughout the quarter. Lab Fee $70.  C. Sullivan. Spring.

24104.  Cinematic Exchange in Indian Film.  (SALC 20504) 

This class looks at the texture of Indian films by focusing on particular instances of intertextual influence, repetition and borrowing. Indian film, particularly Bollywood is known as a stridently national cinema with a unique cinematic masala hybrid style. This class explores the Indian masala film style by looking at the various relations between Indian films and global films. How does intertextuality manifest itself in Indian cinema? How does such a hybrid cinematic form become a champion of the nation? What are the ways in which Indian cinema relates to other films and literary texts?  B. Tiwari.  Autumn.

20202. Feminist Theory and Counter-Cinema. (CMST 40202)

Feminism in Great Britain, France, and America has produced a rigorous intellectual, theoretical, and aesthetic legacy within the field of film studies. This course will explore the central debates of feminist psychoanalytic film theory (the patriarchal unconscious; Hollywood narrative; the gaze; genre; visual/female pleasure; masochism; the female spectator; resistant spectators) and criticism as we also integrate the contemporary movement of feminist historiography into our central mode of inquiry. The theoretical debates surrounding the critique of language, the question of feminine writing, cinécriture, and the female author will inform our investigation of the radical aesthetics of feminist counter cinema. Films include:Queen Christina, Orlando, Craig’s Wife, Le Bonheur, Vertigo,Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Mahogany, Salome, Fuses, Riddles of the Sphynx, Film About a Woman Who..., Jeanne Dielman, Tapage Nocturne, Sex is Comedy. J. Wild. Autumn.

23403.  French Cinema.

This class is a survey of French Cinema from the pioneer era to the contemporary moment. After looking at silent comedies and newsreels, French Impressionism, silent features, French Poetic realism, Vichy cinema and the “tradition of quality,” we will be confronted with traditions of radical filmmaking practice that were subsequently contextualized by the Algerian war, the riots of May 1968, women’s liberation, the New Novel, intellectual film criticism, and the rise of “auteurism.” We will also discuss how “cinéphilia” and cultural institutions such as La Cinémathèque Française continue to inform the vibrancy of French culture at large.  Our reflection will be organized equally around the formal developments of French cinema, the history of cinema culture, and the historical discourse of national cinema that negotiates the politics of immigration, urbanization, religion and laïcité, globalizaiton, as well as a host of long-standing state policies and practices associated with the culture industry. J. Wild. Winter.

27402.  The Modern Body and the Cinema.

From the late nineteenth-century motion studies of Marey and Muybridge, to the abstract spectacle of Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance, to the slapstick comedies of Chaplin or Jean Durand, to early medical films, or the face of Maria Falconetti projected twenty five feet tall in close-up, early and silent cinema present a range of technological and aesthetic terms for a history of modern figuration.  This class uses the body as a point of entry to an exploration of film aesthetics (from early cinema to post-WWII) in order to discuss how cinematographic temporality, spatiality, plasticity, materiality and hapticality underwrite the stakes of modern human figuration, expressivity, and even stardom within the context of modernity, war, and modernism. Films, among others, by Méliès, Chaplin, Keaton, Deed, Léger, Lang, Dreyer, Riefenstahl, Tati, Bresson, Maas, Ono, Brakhage, Denis. Cross-listed with the Center for Gender Studies. J. Wild. Winter.

29800.  Senior Colloquium. 

PQ: CMST 10100.  Required of all Cinema and Media Studies majors.This seminar is designed to provide senior concentrators with a sense of the variety of methods and approaches in the field (such as formal analysis, cultural history, industrial history, reception studies, psychoanalysis).  Students will present material relating to their B.A. project, which will be discussed in relation to the issues of the course.  Preceptor.  Autumn.