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.

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.  Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

20601.   Queering the Text: Lesbian and Gay Lit in Film Adaptation. (=ENGL 24802). 

This class will focus on filmed adaptations of novels and plays concerned with lesbian and gay representation.  In addition to the subject matter of their source texts, these films are "queer" in that they presume to transform existing narrative for a new medium, with a new voice, to a new audience.  Such presumptuousness often causes filmed adaptations to be characterized in terms of vilified sexuality: compared to their literary counterparts, they are "trash," are "bastardizations," or are simply "unfaithful."  Rather than restricting ourselves to a reductive discussion of original versus copy,  this class will consider how the strategies of adaptation expose the representational politics and aesthetics of both film and literary texts.  Readings and screenings will include /Maurice, Orlando, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, /and /Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit./  E. Binggeli. Winter.

21400.   The Rhetorics of Studio Era Censorship. (=ENGL 24803)

This course will examine film censorship in Hollywood's studio era as industrial practice and narrative technology.   We will consider how the many players in film censorship ñ advocacy groups, exhibition boards, governmental bodies, and the studios themselves ñ created a discourse of the visible and invisible in Hollywood narrative film.   In addition to critically reading histories and theories of censorship, we will analyze the narrative effects of censorship on produced films and trace the effects of censorship on Hollywood's "rejects" through an examination of studio archival records related to unproduced projects.   E. Binggeli. Autumn

21403. Landscape and Cinema.

This course examines historical and theoretical contexts for thinking about "landscape" within a variety of filmmaking practices (early, non-fiction, blockbuster, classical Hollywood, experimental). From panoramic views in early cinema to the SFX sublime of The Perfect Storm, we'll look at a broad range of films whose "settings" will challenge the way we think about dramaturgy and narration in film. Can a landscape be a protagonist? Can it be an event? Cinematic landscapes demonstrate the ability of cinema to "directly" capture natural phenomena both microscopic and monumental, ephemeral and prehistoric. Yet, we can also identify conventions borrowed from other media, and different modes of filmmaking and individual filmmakers introduce their own methods for conveying (and creating) "place." Accordingly, we will discuss both relevant critical concepts and technical processes (including local color, pictorialism; location shooting, chroma key). This course will introduce precise vocabulary for analyzing the differences between space, place, landscape, scenery, setting, and compositional spaceóand debate how these distinctions are drawn. Special emphasis on close analysis of films. Autumn. D. Lewis

21803. Black, White and Other: Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema to 1960.

This course will consider the history of American cinema from its earliest beginnings to the twilight of the classical era through its representations and interactions with race and ethnicity, not only as a promulgation of stereotypes, but also as images of identification for marginalized groups. We will be equally interested in the production and reception of these images as well as the way different ethnicities interact in early and classical American film, expanding the binary of white and Black or self and Other to a multiplicity of identities and subject positions. It will finally draw on major strains of film theory and criticism in relation to race and ethnicity and is organized around questions of genre, stardom, and performance in American film as shaped by race and ethnicity. Autumn. C.Petersen.

22501. From Hitler to Hollywood: German Refugees and American Film. (GRMN 22500/ENGL 28105/HIST 22205).

Against the background of Hollywood’s changing attitudes toward Hitler’s Germany, this course will explore the links between fascism, emigration and film through the perspective of the refugee community in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. Retracing one major escape route from Central Europe to America, we will examine filmic and literary attempts to capture the experience of a displaced person, endangered, defenseless and unwelcome everywhere. The social and professional situation as well as the political activities of Hollywood's approximately eight hundred, mainly Jewish European refugees will be studied along with a discussion of the extent of the film exiles’ impact on American filmmaking and politics during this period. We will consider impressions of short and long-term returnees to Germany after the war and attempt to clarify the controversial issue of this mass migration’s artistic, political and intellectual legacy in Hollywood. K. Loew. Spring

23404.  French Cinema, 1920s-1930s.

In our study of two decades in the history of French cinema, we will track the rise of the poetic realist style from the culture of experimentation that was alive in both the French film industry and its surrounding artistic and literary landscape. As an exercise in the excavation of a history of film style, we will consider the salient features of the socio-political, cultural, theoretical, and critical landscape that frame the emergence and the apex of poetic realism, and that reveal it as a complicated nexus in the history of film aesthetics. Main texts by Dudley Andrew and Richard Abel will accompany a wide range of primary texts. Films by Epstein, L'Herbier, BuÒuel, Dulluc, Dulac, Gance, Clair, Vigo, Feyder, Renoir, Duvivier, AllÈgret, CarnÈ, GrÈmillon. This class is cross-listed with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and may be accompanied by a French language section. J. Wild. Winter.

23903. 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.

24604.  Women in Chinese Film.  (=CMST 44604, GNDR 24601/44600, EALC 24604/34604) 

From the earliest days of filmmaking in China, a succession of iconic women provided focal points for questions of cultural identity, modernity, and national liberation.  This course surveys changing meanings associated with the figure of woman -- as subject, performer, and author -- in classics of Shanghai and Hong Kong cinema, and in the work of recent filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Stanley Kwan, Li Shaohong, Li Yu, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Nuanxin, and Zhang Yimou.  Throughout, we take into account aesthetic and social contexts of production and reception, examining the films alongside the related media of fiction, the illustrated periodical press, theatre, and television.  K. Harris.  Spring.

24701. Left-Wing Art and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s. 

(=CMST 34701) The course will consider Soviet "montage cinema" of the twenties in the context of coeval aesthetic projects in other arts. How did Eisenstein's theory and practice of "intellectual cinema" connect to Fernand Leger and Vladimir Tatlin? What did Meyerkhold's "biomechanics" mean for film makers? Among other figures and issues, we will address Dziga Vertov and Constructivism, German Expressionism and Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Formalist poetics and FEKS directors. The course will be film-intensive (up to three hours of out-of-class viewings per week). T. Tsivian.  Winter.

24903. Cinema in Japan: Art and Commerce in a Transnational Medium. (=CMST 34903, EALC 24903/34903)

This course surveys Japanese cinema from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. We will focus on both aspects of the object of study: Japan and the cinema. Each week will present, in roughly chronological order, a "moment" from the history of Japanese cinema and a methodological issue in film studies brought into focus by that week's films. For example, we will study vernacular modernism in 1930s Japan, the war film and theories of propaganda, genre theory and 1950s program pictures. We will of course pay attention to the Masters of Japanese cinema (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, et. al.) but we will also study film in relation to broader cultural movements such as the "new wave" and the "political modernist" turn. We will also interrogate theories of national cinema and study theories of ethnicity and recent Japanese representations of the Other. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required, though accommodations will be made for students who wish to read original language material. M. Raine. Autumn.

24904. Authors of the Japanese Cinema: Ozu Yasujiro and Postwar Japan.

(=CMST 34904) Ozu Yasujiro is widely regarded as one of the finest film-makers in the history of the medium. This course studies every film Ozu made during the later part of his career. Half of the films will be 35mm prints shown as part of a series at DOC films on Sunday nights, the rest will be class screenings. After surveying Ozu's early career we move through the Occupation-era films that dented and then reestablished Ozu's reputation to the rigorous "late style" of Ozu's final films, made when he was one of the most prestigious filmmakers in Japan and the Japanese film industry was at the height of its commercial success. Topics covered in the course include the wartime reinvention of Japanese cinema, the overt connection between Ozu's films and social change in postwar Japan, the shifts in the film industry of which these films were a part, the theory and practice of Ozu the auteur, and the peculiar understanding of the film medium that develops in Ozu's films. Spring. M. Raine.

24908.  Film Genre and the Japanese Period Film. 

This course introduces problems in film genre theory through a historical overview of jidaigeki, or the Japanese period film.We’ll consider the connections between jidaigeki and Japanese theater, storytelling, popular literature, comics, and other modern cultural forms.  The course will also cover a variety of issues related to historical representation, for example: the relationship of historical representation to national identity and state ideology; the invention of tradition in modern Japan; distinctions between history and myth, authenticity and romance.  We’ll track changes in jidaigeki style and subject matter, and think broadly about historicizing genre—interpreting repetition and innovation, intertextuality, and developments in narrative structure, iconography, style, and affect over time.  Film screenings include a number of jidaigeki by Kurosawa Akira, through which we’ll compare genre theory and auteur theory as methods of comparing common themes and structures across a group of films. Winter. D. Lewis.

25505/35505. The Detective Film

The detective appears in the middle of the nineteenth century as a harbinger of a new modern world of urban crime and uncertain identity. As a figure in fiction, the detective not only marks new attitudes towards criminality and surveillance, but also introduces new modes of popular narrative. This course will deal the detective as a figure of modern society and with the narrative of investigation as a new storytelling mode in which time, point of view and engagement with the reader become foregrounded. Although focused primarily on films, we will also read literary models and precursors and discuss the relation between literary and cinematic modes of narration. The classical armchair detective such as Sherlock Holmes; the comic detective of the 1930's; the hard-boiled private eye of film noir; and the metaphysical detectives of modernist works will all be explored, as well such themes as master criminals, erotic obsessions and the labyrinth of the past. Films by Griffith, Feuliade, Lang, Tourneur, Aldrich, Wilder, Godard and others will be screened. T. Gunning. Winter.

26200/36200. Brecht and Beyond 

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory generally is also considerable. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920's to the agitprop Lehrstück and film esp Kuhle Wampe) to the classical parable plays, as well as the work of his heirs in German theatre (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss) and film (RW Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge), in French film (Jean-Luc Godard) and cultural theory (the Situationists and May 68) Britain (John McGrath, Caryl Churchill, and the film-maker Lindsay Anderson), and theatre and film in Africa, from South Africa to Senegalís master film maker Djibril Diop Mambety. L. Kruger. Winter.