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.  J. Wild. and Staff.  Autumn. Spring.

20101. Women Mystery Writers: From Page to Screen. (=GNDR 20202)

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.

21101. American Film Melodrama and The Gothic.

American film melodrama has been considered both the genre of suffering protagonists, incredible coincidences, and weeping spectators as well as a mode of action, suspense, and in-the-nick-of-time escapes. In this course, we will examine American film melodrama in terms of a dialectic of sentiment and sensation that draws heavily on Gothic tropes of terror, live burial, and haunted internal states. We will trace the origins of film melodrama and the cinematic Gothic to their literary antecedents, the horrors of the French Revolution, and classical and sensational stage melodramas of the nineteenth century. In addition to the 1940s Gothic woman’s film cycle, we will excavate the Gothic in the maternal melodrama of the 1930s, the suspense thriller, noir detective film, domestic melodrama, the birth of the slasher film, and the supernatural horror film of the 1970s. Literary sources will include works by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Directors considered will include D.W. Griffith, King Vidor, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk, William Friedkin, Tim Burton, and our major example, Alfred Hitchcock.C. Petersen. Spring.

21800. Animals and Cinema: From Horror to Wildlife Documentary.  

From the first films on, animals have been a constant presence on the screen, whether in safari films, popular science films, avant-garde films, horror and sci-fi films, anthropomorphizing narrative films with animal stars, or wildlife documentaries. What is this fascination of the cinema with animals? How do our encounters with animals in the movie theater differ from encounters in zoos, at home, or in the wild? What happens to animals when they are technologically mediated, and what happens to (human) spectators in the film experience of wild, cute, strange, or horrifying creatures? In this course, we will examine films including Electrocution of an Elephant (1903), Starewicz’s insect stop motion animations, American creature features such as Tarantula, as well as Tourneur’s Cat People, Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and others. With the help of these films, we will investigate relationships among humans, animals and technology in modernity, as well as concepts of animation, life, and wildlife. This course will familiarize students with the philosophical background of the “question” of the animal and engage film criticism that focuses on the ways in which film communicates, mediates, and transforms creaturely life. The course will incorporate readings by André Bazin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, J.M. Coetzee, Donna Haraway, Akira Lippit, Mary Ann Doane, Gilles Deleuze, Dudley Andrew, and others.  I. Pollman.  Autumn.

21801. Chicago Film History. (=CMST 31801, ARTV 26750/36750)

This course will screen and discuss films to consider whether there is a Chicago style of filmmaking. We will trace how the city informs documentary, educational, industrial, narrative feature, and avant-garde films. If there is a Chicago style of filmmaking, one must look at the landscape of the city, the design, politics, cultures, and labor of its people, and how they live their lives. The protagonists and villains in these films 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. J. Hoffman. Spring.

21900. 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 television's 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.

21901. Pickford and the American Film Industry. 

E. Binggeli. Autumn.

23000.  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.

23001. 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.

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.

23904. Latin American Cinema.

This course is a survey of Latin American cinema with a critical focus on the debates surrounding national and transnational film. The first third of the course will examine the critiques and defenses of national cinema, attending in particular to the distinct concerns of postcolonial polities. In Latin America, these concerns have included cultural imperialism arising from neocolonial economic relations, the incorporation of non-white majorities into foundational myths of national origin, and the construction of cohesive national histories and traditions. The second third of the course will consider the differences between national cinema before and after the advent of the New Latin American Cinema in the 1960s. With the emergence of a New Latin American Cinema and the associated theory and criticism of the 1960s, national cinema was tied to an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics. Aesthetic modernism, left political radicalism, and the new attempt to make a properly national cinema were joined in a single continental cinema project. But with the waning of left politics in the region and the intellectual challenges to the core-periphery schemas associated with the dependency school, new questions have arisen about the validity of that project. The last third of the course will explore recent debates about globalization, transnationalism, and post-nationalism—reflected in the critical discussion of films like City of God and Y tu mamá también—and how they are revising the terms of the 1960s controversies, for better and for worse. Films will include Memorias del subdesarrollo, La hora de los hornos, El Coraje del pueblo, Ganga Bruta, Araya, Sin dejar huella, La cienaga.S. Skvirsky. Spring.

24610.  Cinema and Politics in China.

In this course we will consider the intimate if often reluctant involvement of cinema with politics in three periods of modern Chinese history. We will start with the attempts by the Communist Party and Nationalist state alike to use the nascent Chinese cinema for ideological indoctrination in the 1930s, continue with the increasingly total ideological and aesthetic control of cinema during the Socialist era from 1949 onward and end with the critique of that totalitarianism and explorations of previously-proscribed techniques and subjectivities in the post-Socialist cinema of the 1980s. The "big question" we will explore is the interweaving of politics and aesthetics. A distinctive feature of Chinese cinema is that it has seen heavy intervention by political and intellectual elites. Some wanted to use cinema for mass education or indoctrination. Others were against such uses--but for what reasons? We will also read some of the latest scholarship on Chinese cinema that departs from this top-down paradigm and attempts a less elitest look at Chinese cinema and mass media. Key terms include "social realism," "socialist realism," "melodrama" and "vernacular modernism." A. D. Xiang. Spring.

24907. 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. Winter.

24905. Agitation and Propaganda: Cinema in Wartime Japan (=EALC 24905/34905)

This class traces the deployment of cinema as both national culture and “optical weapon” during a time of total war. We will study the Film Law of 1939 and the "national policy films" and "people's films" that attempted to raise the aesthetic and technical level of cinema in Japan in order to compete with the memory of Hollywood films both at "home" and in the Asian countries occupied by Japan. The class will include films made under Japanese sponsorship in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea as well as in the puppet state of Manchuria and the occupied territory of Shanghai. We will also study local sources of wartime Japanese cinema -- the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde -- in the context of the broader image culture of wartime Japan. No knowledge of Japanese is required: separate section for discussion of Japanese and other Asian sources. M. Raine. Spring.

25510. The Western.

The western was the most dominant genre in Hollywood cinema from the 1910s to the 1960s, constituting as much as one quarter of all production during that time. For this reason the western has played a deep and important role in the development not only of action films but of Hollywood production in general, including even the relocation of American film production from the East Coast to the West Coast. In addition the western has been viewed by critics, scholars, and filmmakers as having a privileged position in regard to reflecting and registering the American condition and the condition of the American state, commenting on both domestic issues including McCarthyism and racism as well as US foreign policy and its role in the world from at least World War II through the Cold War and beyond. This course will provide a survey of the sound western from the 1930s to the 1970s, examining its changing place in Hollywood and America. The western genre will be examined as both a set stylistic and structural choices or possibilities as well as a group of texts with a special, often allegorical, often problematic, relationship with American current events. Films to be studied include Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, High Noon, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, High Plains Drifter, and Blazing Saddles. M. Hauske. Winter.

27101. Cinema and the City.

This course traces out the relations between film style and aesthetics and the experiences and visuality particular to modern city life. Focus will be paid to how films have imagined cities and created narratives around them as well as to ideas about the particularly visual nature of urban space and circulation. Lectures and screenings will cover film cycles and genres from the city symphony and film noir, to Skateboard videos and The Wire, as well as particular directors—Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Pierre Melville, Fritz Lang, Michael Mann, among others—whose body of work indicates an ongoing concern with metropolitan themes and ideas. Though concentrating primarily on North American and European films, South American and Asian cinemas will also be considered, as will be the shifting viewing contexts within which films are watched. Course readings will center primarily on experiences of urban modernity, film form, and film history, but will also cover urbanism and urban history, urban sociology, and architecture. N. Holmes. Winter.

27800.  Theories of Media.  (=CMST 37800, ARTH 25900/35900, ARTV 25400, ENGL 12800/32800, ISHU 21800, MAPH 32800). 

PQ: Any 10000-level ARTH or ARTV 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.

28303. Before and After Beckett: Drama and anti drama in theatre 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.

28500. History of International Cinema, Part I, Silent Era. (=CMST 48500, 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.

28600. History of International Cinema, Part II, Sound Cinema to 1960 (=CMST 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.

28000. Documentary Video. (=CMST 38000, 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.

28001. Documentary Video: Production Techniques. (=CMST 38001, 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.

28920. Introduction to Film Production. (=CMST 38920, 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.

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.  J. Lastra.  Autumn.

29900.  B.A. Research Paper. 

PQ: Consent of instructor.  Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form.  This course may not be counted toward distribution requirements for the major, but may be counted as a free-elective credit.  Staff.  Autumn, Winter, Spring.