• Film 200: Film Theory
• Film 201: Film Historiography
  

• Cinema and Postcoloniality
• Film Noir
• The Dialectical Image
• Moving Image Pornographies, Off and On/Scene
• Pre-Cinema/Para-Cinema
• Photography as Form and Practice
• Film from Colonialism to Globalization
• Korean Cinema
• The Non-Linear Narrative
• Nation Land Representation
• Canonical Texts as Cultural Objects in Cinema: The Bible

Film 200
Instructor: Linda Williams

This course offers an advanced introduction to the field of film theory. It is divided into three sections: 1) "classic" works of film theory focusing on questions of modernity, mass production, formalism and realism; 2) the seventies' era of "grand theory" focusing on questions of semiotics, psychoanalysis and sexual difference; 3) recent works of visual and cultural studies, focusing on questions of visual culture, postmodernism, new viewing positions and new media. An overriding category important to all periods will be that of spectatorship. Although we will read these works in roughly chronological order, we will not assume a teleology of development from more "primitive" to more "advanced." Throughout the course we will attempt to place theorists in conversation with one another about crucial questions of moving-image representation and spectatorship.

Requirements: Full attendance and helpful (vocal) contributions to both formal and informal discussions (20%); short summary-reaction papers and oral presentations (20%); 20-page seminar paper (40%) on a topic related to film theory; participation in final conference (20%)

Required texts: Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations; Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory; Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema; Hugo Munsterber, The Film: A Psychological Study; Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film

Recommended texts: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image; Cinema 2: The Time Image; Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema; B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement; J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction; Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film; Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory; Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art; Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art

Film 201
Instructor: Mark Sandberg

The theoretical and methodological issues raised by the practice of film history are the focus of this seminar. Intended primarily for first-year Film Studies graduate students and students applying for the Designated Emphasis in film, the seminar examines recent models of film history and helps students begin to ask interesting film-historical questions and to determine a suitable research methodology. The readings for the course, many of which cluster around the issues of early and silent cinema historiography, have been chosen for their value as models and analogies for the students' own research and writing, not for their content per se. There will be film screenings to support the week's reading as well.

The research projects for the course are intended to give students the chance to gain experience working with a variety of primary and archival sources. To this end, students will be introduced the resources at Pacific Film Archive and other research locations. The choice of the research topic is open; it can engage with any historical period, any cultural setting, and any kind of primary source, but must tackle fundamental historiographical questions. Students will present the results of their research near the end of the seminar.

Required Texts: David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style; Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film; Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema; Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American CInema; Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception

Recommended Texts: Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice

Instructor: Chris Berry

This course asks, "Can postcolonial theory contribute to Cinema Studies?" In order to answer this questin, we will consider the work of a range of writers, including Edward Said, Rey Chow, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Theories, concepts and ideas in postcolonial theory to be covered will include orientalism, subalternity, diasporic subjects and exiles, colonial mimicry, transnationality and autoethnography. Critques of postcoloniality from both the left and the right will be examined. We will also consider how this discourse known as postcolonial theory can complement and/or challenge various existing areas within Cinema Studies, such as national cinemas, Third Cinema, ethnicity in the cinema, ethnographic cinema, and so forth. In considering these existing areas, we will also compare postcolonial theory to the earlier theories that subtend the existing areas.

The topic of this course is Noir cinema. We'll start with Fury (1936) and The Letter (1940), continue through the classic era (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, D.O.A., Mildred Pierce,  They Won't Believe Me, Detour, Sunset Boulevard, The Manchurian Candidate) and conclude with an example or two of late and neo-noir (Chinatown and perhaps The Last Seduction). The main aim of the course is to apprehend the noir phenomenon-to examine the major films and to read both classical and newer writings on the "genre." As a secondary aim, we will, in this iteration of the course, consider noir's "paranoid intuition." The claim, within political theory, that paranoia is distinctively American has for at least some writers rested on the evidence of popular cinema, especially movies of the noir sort. Among the questions we will take up are: what constitutes paranoia? what is it about film in particular that has made it so central to charges of cultural paranoia? to what extent is "paranoia" a procedural logic-a process of plotting as well as a type of plot? why American? why noir?

In this course we will explore new approaches to the image explored in Europe in the 1920's and 1930's by intensely innovative thinkers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Jean Cocteau, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein (among others). To what extent was the combination of Marx and Freud productive for the European avant-garde, and how did that combination differ from country to country and from artist to artist? How did these writers and artists transform the "dialectic" as they incorporated it into their concepts of image and imagination? We will pay particular attention to the places where these thinkers' ideas intersect, and to the ways their experiments in word and image demonstrate the great range of aesthetic and philosophical contexts operative in Europe at that time. Our guidebook for the semester will be Walter Benjamin's vast compendium of notes and clippings, The Arcades Project, newly available in English.

"The visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.... Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body." (Frederic Jameson)

Jameson's pronouncement about the essential pornography of the visible will be the starting point for this seminar's investigation into the history and rhetoric of visual pornographies (something Jameson himself seems to consider beyond the pale.) What does it mean to "stare at the world as though it were a naked body?" What does it mean to be moved by moving sexual images? What are the regimes of vision that have authorized forms of "rapt, mindless fascination"? What is the embodied nature of vision engaged in such viewing? How have these regimes changed over time? In this seminar we shall bring together debates about the nature of pornography with debates about the nature of the visual and the nature of "embodied" forms of vision. Both will be consdiered in relation to the (mostly unwritten) history of American (and a few other examples of) visual pornography. In particular, we will concentrate on the changes that have taken place between an earlier era of "obscenity", in which explicit sexual images were kept off-scene for the comsumption of private elites, and a more contemporary, and increasingly electronic era of "on/scenity" when pornographies of all sorts become available to wide varieties of consumers. Although moving-image pornographies will be our primary objects of study, this seminar will also consider larger issues concerning the rhetoric of still and moving images, obscene bodies, technologies of arousal, techniques of observers and other popular genres which aim to "move" the bodies of spectators.

This seminar takes as its area of investigation the question of early cinema's adjacency to other practices of visual and mass culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Cinema has long been seen as a culmination of other developments in mass entertainment, as the form of visual culture that subsumed all others as the twentieth century progressed. More recent approaches have retreated from teleology, emphasizing instead cinema's imbrication in the everyday life modernity. In these studies, cinema often makes its appearance "off-center," as part of a constellation of visual practices. This seminar takes as its project the evaluation of such models of early cinema, especially as they have influenced and continue to influence the practice of film history. We will be assisted in this by wide reading in historical and theoretical studies of "para-cinema" that have emerged in recent years.

In this course, we will read a wide range of theorists in an attempt to define photography as a form. In addition, we will look closely at the work of a number of contemporary photographers. Written materials will include articles and books by contemporary theorists like Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Craig Owens, Victor Burgin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Tagg and Alan Sekula, but also essays by earlier theorists like Andre Bazin, Wlater Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. We will supplement these texts with several phenomological texts. Photographers to be examined may include Jeff Wall, Tracey Moffatt, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Victor Burgin and Robert Mapplethorpe. I am also interested in looking at some works situated "between" photography and other art forms, such as Hollis Frampton's film Nostalgia, James Coleman's "slide shows," and the photographic paintings of Hanns Richter.

This seminar considers film and other screen-based media including television and CMC (Computer-Mediated Communications) as objects—and usually also commodities—of transnational circulation, and the history of the theoretical paradigms developed to understand this phenomenon.

Although there will be wide historical coverage, we will focus on the implications of this material for the post 9-11 environment. For example, what is the role now of international film festivals, arthouse imports, “world cinema” courses in academia, and other institutions once considered sites promoting third world resistance? In an environment characterized by postcoloniality and global corporate capitalism enforced unilaterally by the military power of the United States, how relevant is the notion of the third world and is it possible for cinema to promote resistance? How should we understand regional and non-Western popular film phenomena such as Bollywood, Hong Kong and Korea, as well as other screen-based phenomena such as Al-Jazeera and independent and socially-engaged video documentary?

The course will cover paradigms such as colonial discourse, neocolonialism, decolonization, Third Cinema, national cinema, the Three Worlds model and the North/South model, core-periphery models, postcolonial theory, transnational cinema, and globalization theory. Authors may include Fanon, Spivak, Bhabha, Hardt & Negri, Shohat & Stam, Willemen, Chow, Solanas & Getino, and others. A wide range of films, film movements, and other screen-based media will be addressed.

This course takes South Korea cinema to interrogate issues like nationalism and gender, the new trans-Asian culturalism, and globalization. Cinema offers a privileged space of the optical and political unconscious of Korean society. Particular emphasis will be put on the two "golden ages" of South Korean cinema ? the sixties and the present (the "post-IMF" period since the International Monetary Fund intervention in the 1997 economic crisis). Films in the fantastic mode, such as the horror and monster movies of 1960s and the present will be dealt with as one of the key sites for constituting social fantasy partly sustained by the cultural machinery known as cinema in the age of modernization. In response to a dire need to read the cinematic society and the societal cinema, the notion of cinematic specificity will be also thrown into relief in the context of non-Western and post?colonial cinema.

The concept of the Non-linear Narrative is an attempt to understand the challenges that database-interface systems pose to traditional concepts of the narrative. In database-interface systems, such as personal data assistants, interactive narratives or online games, access to information is not organized through time. It is organized through an interface. The interface gives users a set of choices and parameters with which they can organize information. In this seminar, we will study how this fundamentally different, non-linear organization of information affects the relation between author and reader, introduces deferred agency and implements a rhetoric of multiple choices. We will question the database-interface as a novel tool for engagement between a user and a database, a database and other databases, and most importantly, between users and other users.

Rather than exploring these topics through observation alone, we will produce a database and interface for an online game, and engage with the course topics through direct experimentation. The proposed theme of the game is the Mexican-American border, and the objective is safe passage for one group of players, and border enforcement for another group of players

We will develop the game in Flash. No programming experience is required. The seminar will meet weekly, Tue/Thu from 9 to 12, but participants are expected to commit to at least 10 hours per week of research, experimentation, and production time beyond the seminar hours.

This seminar will raise questions about the concept of the "national" in cinema and culture. Although the seminar will draw its examples from German cinema, much of the theoretical writings and discussions will apply to topics beyond a purely national cinema. In fact one of our goals is precisely to challenge any pure conception of a "national cinema." Drawing on theoretical work by Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, Jurgen Habermas, Iain Chambers, James Clifford, Hamid Naficy, and Arjun Appadurai among others, the seminar will explore issues of political and cultural identity from the 1920s to the present. How does Weimar and Nazi German cinema construct a national identity through scenarios of imaginary travel and encounters? How does recent German cinema deal with migration, itinerancy, diaspora, exile, and mobile citizenship? How does German multiculturalism contribute to and complicate contemporary debates about transnational cinema? How can binary oppositions between "foreign" and "native" culture be deconstructed? What is the role of national cinema in the age of globalization and multinational co-productions? The seminar's emphasis will be on historical and contemporary gestures toward cultural transfer and communication. Interests in other cinemas beyond German are particularly welcome. Films screened will include Lang's Destiny and Siegfried; Murnau's Tabu; Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will; Sirk's La Habanera; Fassbinder's Katzelmacher; Wenders' Kings of the Road; Herzog's Fata Morgana; von Trotta, The Promise; Akin's Short Sharp Shock; Ustaoglu's Journey to the Sun. The seminar will be complemented by occasional guest speakers; it will culminate in a student-run symposium focusing on colonialism, nationalism, and cultural memory. Given in English; films are subtitled.

Instructor: Gavriel Moses

Objects in cinema "are" content. Books in cinema, on the other hand, also "have" content. More so, by far, canonical texts such as the Bible. This course plans to examine the presence and functions of Canonical Texts as Cultural Objects[s] in cinema, with special emphasis on the Bible. Seminar students will be invited, should they wish to do so, to look at any other kind of canonical text that in some fashion is present within cinema as more than reference, quotation or source of a story. In other words, it is the productive presence of such texts as cultural objects in cinema that we are seeking.

Mr. Moses will concentrate on films in which the Bible plays a role by its actual material presence (direct or by displacement) on screen. The focus is therefore not on Bible Epics or modern dress analogues to Biblical stories, situations and characters. To the extent that students will choose other canonical texts as their projects, their oral presentations (and their films) will be incorporated into the Seminar. Recent approaches to film study in the context of Material Culture will be used, as well as recent work in religious studies that has brought to bear the methods of cultural studies upon religious texts, objects and practices.