A Selection of Undergraduate Courses
 
 
  Writing the Cinematic City
  This course is designed to help students develop confidence and skill when writing film-related essays and research papers. Although the focus of the class will be on both the analysis of visual media and the development of writing skills, our quest to become better critics will be organized around the idea of the "cinematic city." By looking at films that examine different dimensions of the urban experience, we shall address the conjunction of geography and subjectivity that is operative in the ways in which each of us "tells our own story." Films about cinematic cities (such as Woody Allen's Manhattan, Rossellini's Rome Open City, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, etc.) help us to understand the ways in which we are formed as subjects, with specific identities, in specific places and times.
 
  The History and Theory of the Modern Documentary
 

This course looks at the development of modern documentary film, taking as a starting point the invention of synchronous-sound equipment circa 1960 and continuing through to the present (video, digital, and Sundance sensations). We will examine the truth claims of nonfiction cinema across a range of practices and consider genre strategies: cinema verite, direct cinema, narrator-driven documentary, autobiography, investigative documentary, and hybrid fictional styles that combine the essayistic with the observational.

What is it that documentary does, and what does it claim to do? Can objectivity be separated from subjectivity? The course will consider the technical and the ideological, paying attention, for instance, to the effect on documentary of the radical engaged documentarians of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist film movement of the 1970s and the centrality of race and sexuality in the documentaries of the 1990s. What effect has the invention of the camcorder had on our sense of documentary form? How does the filmmaker's appearance center-stage influence our experience? Extensive reading and outside viewing required, with two short papers and one final paper required. Note that a nine-minute documentary (with a short written statement) may be substituted for the final paper upon approval of its subject.
 
  A Century of International Cinema
  Film 50 surveys a century of international cinema, designed for non-film majors who want to explore the history and aesthetics of narrative features. Students study major film styles and genres, including German Expressionism, French Impressionism, Russian Montage, Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave, and the work of Denmark's Dogme 95. The course also looks at how certain landmark films including Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, Renoir's La chienne, and Jarmusch's Dead Man, defy easy categorization. Throughout, we consider how movies connect with other arts, social and political currents, and how they form a distinct medium of expression.
 
  Film Language
  In Film 25B we will analyze film language, from the beginning of the sound era to the present, focusing on the development of historically significant film styles and national movements: the Hollywood studio film (the maternal melodrama, the screwball comedy, the musical and the film noir) ; Italian Neorealism; the French New Wave; the European, Indian and Asian Art film, third world political cinema, feminist cinema. Throughout the course we will address the following interrelated questions and concerns: (1) What are the aesthetic, psychological and ideological implications of the addition of sound to the highly developed picture language of the silent cinema? (2) What is the source of pleasure and fascination in the cinema and what part does sound play in increasing these effects? (3) What is the appeal of realism in film and how do films construct and deconstruct the illusion of reality? How and why do conventions of film realism change over time? (4) What are the aesthetic, psychological and ideological differences between the classical Hollywood film and the "Art Film"? (5) How do films construct race and gender representations and how do these representations differ in various National cinemas?
 
  No Body is Perfect: Race, Comedy, and Marriage Plot in American Cinema
 

This course examines how comedy in American cinema has been enlisted to stage race, sexuality, and their conjunction in twentieth-century America. We focus on a traditional anchor in the comic vision of social integration: the "marriage plot." In spite of its promises of respectability and stability, marriage or the prospect of marriage in the films that we will examine seems to constitute the very site of gender, racial, and social mayhem. Furthermore, these confusions frequently coincide with another "threshold" question: the question of citizenship, of what it means to be or become an American. Marriage is thus a place where love and nationhood come to exorcise their demons, a task that produces humor as well as failure, exuberance as well as disarray.

Taking the marriage plot as the communal narrative through which sexual, racial, and national tensions negotiate their conflicts, this course will analyze films made by, and sometimes about, Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, as well as movies from mainstream Hollywood (screwball comedies from the forties and fifties) that do not, at first sight, seem to thematize race but are in fact working through the racial and sexual troubles haunting the formation of the nation. We will also expand our investigation into marriage beyond the traditional notion of a union between a heterosexual couple to other permutations, including variations on the marriage of convenience, the green card marriage, the arranged marriage, and "marriage" between men. The goal of the course aims, not at "racializing" humor, but at an exploration of how humor presents a social strategy for mediating different ethnic groups' specific histories and relations to America.

Films include: His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Some Like It Hot, Night at the Opera, Monkey Business, Hannah and her Sisters, Boy! What a Girl!, Bamboozled, Beverly Hills Cops, Eat a Bowl of Tea, Living on Tokyo Time, The Wedding Banquet.
 
  History of the Film Musical
  In this course we shall trace the evolution of the American Film musical from The Jazz Singer through Dancer in the Dark in conjunction with theoretical writings on genre theory, the subject of what entertainment is, the camp aesthetic of the musical, the serious cultural conflicts addressed behind the fa*ade of the musicalês escapist pleasures, the increasing self-reflexivity of the musical form, and, finally, the musical film's deconstruction of its own modes of entertainment as the genre evolves.
 
  Comedy and Community
  This course will focus on aspects of identity, social interaction and performance in film comedy. Examples will range from early cinema to recent immigrant or gender comedies. Central themes throughout the course will be encounters between individuals from different backgrounds and their mutual relationships, disagreements, and learning processes. Border crossings, strange encounters and surprising fusions in terms of class, gender and ethnicity are recurring patterns in many comedies and provoke the audience to reflect upon conventions which are otherwise taken for granted. Comedies can thus be read as crucial texts in understanding how communities are forged and how group identities are constructed through strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Many comedies employ outsiders, immigrants, underdogs to present and unsettle a society and its norms through defamiliarising eyes. Following the work of major theorists of jokes, humor and carnival (Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, Douglas and others), we shall analyze how revolution and control, anarchy and containment, aggression and laughter are closely interrelated in comedy. Traditionally a playground for disguise and impersonation, for carnivalist subversion and mediated aggression, comedy tends to engage its audience with attacks on order. Why and how do comedies work? Why do audiences laugh at certain scenes and jokes while failing to appreciate others? In our investigations, we shall start with personal responses, but move on to historicize particular films and the expectations of their contemporary audiences, raising questions about casting, performance, role play, enactment of types, and national specificity of humor. Examples will be drawn mainly, but not exclusively, from German cinema and other European cinemas, with a special emphasis on the work of transnational directors and performers, as well as transatlantic exchanges and remakes of comedy material. Films will include (depending on availability of subtitled copies) Ernst Lubitsch's The Oyster Princess and To Be or Not to Be, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, Reinhold Schunzel's Viktor und Viktoria and its various remakes, Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Woody Allen's Zelig, German and Indian remakes of Frank Capra's classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night, the post-war British Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, Doris Dorrie's take on post-1968 masculinity in Men, Franco Brusati's Bread and Chocolate, Hussi Kutlucan's Me Boss, You Sneakers, a recent comedy on illegal immigrants on the building site at the heart of Berlin, and Sinan Cetin's border comedy Propaganda, featuring Turkey's most popular comedian Kemal Sunal in his last role. Readings and discussion in English. Films with English subtitles. Crosslisted with Film 108, sect. 3
 
  Time Machines of the Everyday: Cinema and the Dialectical Image
 

...Not all time machines are the kind that look like rocket ships (get in, push a lever, be transported back to 1492 or ahead to some Morlock-ravaged future). A time machine need not be a vehicle for travel at all, in the ordinary sense (although film did permit such voyaging, at least metaphorically). Let us say instead that "time machines" are machines that produce a certain relationship to space-time. From its earliest days, film did exactly that. Films could be cranked forwards, backwards, faster or slower. Walls emerged fully formed from the dust and rubble of their own destruction; boys popped out of the water and flew back --suddenly dry -- to the banks of the upstream-flowing river. During an age when science was preaching the relativity of time and the relationship between space and time, the cinema made those relationships something a person could experience viscerally, and filmmakers of the silent era took great aesthetic advantage of the new plasticity of space and time....

The primary purpose of this seminar is to give students majoring in Film a chance to write a significant research paper on (more or less) the topic of their choice. The theme of the semester ("Cinema and Time") is designed to encompass many possible sorts of topics; although most of the films we discuss in class will come from the 1920's and 1930's, the final research paper does not have to restrict itself to that period. The aim of this class is to make paper-writing as transparent a process as possible.

 
  Sound
  This course will explore the nature, evolution, use, and abuse of sound in cinema. From the first silent films, which weren't presented in silence at all, to current erideä films, the relation between sound and image will be analyzed in detail. While there is a high degree of visual sophistication in audiences and academic analysis, there is an almost equal naivet* when it comes to sound. Starting with the physics of sound and how our perception influences our emotional reactions, we will consider the three main categories of film sound - dialogue, music, effects - from the perspectives of the writer, the director, and the audience, looking at the artistic and technical factors that guide and constrain the creative process, as well as how changes in presentation have affected audience response. Examples will be shown from foreign and domestic feature, documentary, and animated films. Depending on schedules, there will be several guest lectures by directors and editors currently working on the soundtracks of their films, as well as a field trip to The Saul Zaentz Film Center, where the processes involved in creating a soundtrack for a feature will be demonstrated. This provides a unique opportunity to isolate the sonic elements presented in class, explore other alternatives to the finished product, and discuss why final choices were made. At the end of the course, students should be able to bring an increased sophistication and depth to their understanding of how sound contributes to (or diminishes!) the film experience, and be able to express this understanding in a coherent, sensitive, sophisticated, and technically and historically knowledgeable and compelling manner.
 
  Cinema and the Sex Act
  This course considers the history of the representation of the sex act in cinema. When, why and how did movies begin to show the "dirty parts" that had once been carefully elided by a cut to a fire burning in a fire place or a train going through a tunnel? What form did the representation of formerly censored sex acts take in movies nationally and internationally? We will look especially at the period of the emergence of cinematically constructed sex acts on screen in the sixties and seventies across a range of cinematic forms: American avant garde films whose formal innovations were often matched by sexual innovations; international art films that brought a new sexual sophistication to the narrative film; American "blaxploitation" films that broke longstanding taboos against the representation of racial, and interracial, sexual relations; the brief era of porno chic when American pornography seemed poised to challenged Hollywood; and New Hollywood's response to the challenge of these more "adult" forms. Finally, we will consider available contemporary works of film and video which have utilized the performance of explicit sex acts in innovative ways. All of these works will be explored against the background of the much-debated "sexual revolution," diverse theories of sexuality, and the "visual pleasures" of moving pictures.
 
  Film After 911
  This course seeks to look at the phenomenon of September 11th from a cinematic perspective. How will movies react to the changed global order now under construction? How will film studios react to an as-yet temporary distaste for violent thrillers centered on fictive disasters? How have the traumas and social disorders of the past influenced film developments? Utilizing both documentary and dramatic films, this course seeks to understand the way in which mass movements have been mobilized by film and how societies have rebuilt their images after unimaginable devastation through film. Ultimately, this course seeks to use films from the past and corresponding texts to equip students with a range of perspectives for viewing the future. Films may be drawn from the following list: Grand Illusion, La Jetee, The Manchurian Candidate, Point of Order, Antonio das Mortes, The Battle of Algiers, Germany in Autumn, Atomic Cafe, My Son The Fanatic, and others to be announced. Readings will combine historical and theoretical texts to analyze the relationship of film form to political cultures, the ways in which films construct meanings and audiences, and how to make sense of historical moments via cinema.
 
  Hitchcock
 

Alfred Hitchcock: "I put style before content?Content is quite secondary to me." Though the authorÍs well-known prioritization will also be our own in this course, we will take nothing about it as obvious. What counts as style, what tasks it takes on, what pleasures it indulges, what kinds of content it wants to eclipse or aestheticize will be active questions in our survey of Hitchcock's postwar American films from Rope to Marnie.
 
  Ford and Jarmasch
 

John Ford and Jim Jarmusch at first appear to have little in common as directors. Ford worked from the silent period through the height of the Hollywood studio system. His films have enjoyed widespread popularity and have engendered much critical attention over the years. Jim Jarmusch, on the other hand, began making films in the 1980s and has always been highly independent in his production methods. His quirky, idiosyncratic films have generally inspired cult popularity rather than scholarly attention. Yet despite these obvious differences we might usefully consider what these directors and their films have in common. This course will examine the films of Jarmusch and Ford, with our attention focusing on the following topics:

(i) The role of race and ethnicity in their films. (ii) The ways in which they engage questions about nationhood and national identities. (iii) Their interest in outsiders, exiles, and misfits. (iv) The role of history in their work. (v) The extent to which theories of "auteurism" are able to account for the differences and similarities of their films.
 
  National Cinema
  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.
 
  Philippine Cinema
  This course introduces the student to the national cinema of the Philippines. First, it provides a short overview of the historical development of the Philippine film industry from 1897 to the present, highlighting its foreign influences and local sources, its producers, artists and technicians, and the major problems it has confronted through the last century. Second, the course screens the most typical genre movies belonging to the classical Filipino cinema (specifically, the melodrama, the action film, the comedy) as well as selected films from the New Cinema which are characterized by artistic integrity -- from the classics of Gerardo de Leon and Lamberto V. Avellana in the 1950s and 1960s, to the cinematic masterpieces of Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, and Laurice Guilllen in the 1970s and the 1980s, to the most recent works of Chito Rono, Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Joel Lamangan, Jose Javier Reyes, and Jeffrey Jeturian. It also exhibits works from the alternative cinema, such as those by Kidlat Tahimik, Raymond Red, and Nick Deocampo. Third, the course evaluates the films as art works interpreting issues and themes in Philippine society, such as censorship and morality, art and commerce, film and politics, authoritarianism and artistic freedom, hispanism and anglosaxonism, patriarchy and the stereotyping of females and gays, and foreign influence and national identity in cinema. It also examines the film as discourses tending to dismantle or strengthen the power structures in that society.
 
  Special Effects of Simulation
  Is simulation a special case of representation, or is easier to understand as a separate mode of communication, which aims to substitute rather than to represent? In this course, we will analyze which cultural motivations are particular to simulations, and why simulations moved from ritual functions to much broader functions in science, news, art and entertainment in recent times. We will not cover artificial intelligence, magic, or miracles, but focus instead on visual simulations, which are generated by digital media. The course begins with a brief historical review of simulations and with readings to establish a critical context for the understanding of simulations. We then study several contemporary simulations including the Newsweek simulation of the Hainan Spy Plan incident, the simulation of a "Perfect Storm", Char Davies art simulation Immersence and several experimental scientific simulations. We will analyze these simulations in terms of their effect on human experience and our consciousness of the simulated and the associated real events. At the same time, we will explore simulations practically by creating our own simulations in still and moving images with electronic tools. In combining both practical and theoretical exercises, we will develop an understanding of both the production and the reception of contemporary simulations.
 
  Cross-Cultural Images of American Minorities in Film
  Three hours of lecture and two hours of viewing/discussion per week. A critical, historical course describing the cross-cultural images of black Americans, aligned with other ethnic minorities, with attention to comparative changes in their cinematic depictions, from the silent era to the present. Important works that formed specific images of the diverse American population (including Native American, Asian, Hispanic, and other immigrant groups, recently integrated into American culture) are viewed and discussed in order to expose deformations of censorship and history, and to recognize the struggles against prejudices and taboos.
 
  Chinese-Language Literature and Film on the Immigrant Experience
  Analyzes representations of the life of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. in Chinese-language literature and film since the early 20th century, with emphasis on 1960's and beyond. All readings in Chinese; lectures primarily in English; in-class discussion and written assignments in either Chinese or English.
 
  Chicano/Latino Film
  Analysis of films by and about Latinos in the United States. Features are emphasized, with limited coverage of documentaries. This course serves both as introduction to the Latino experience and to the analysis of narrative films.
 
  The Language and Literature of Films
  We travel through the first century of film, studying film's relationship to literature in adaptation. Looking at silent films, early talkies, Hollywood classics, musicals, documentary realist representations, intercultural productions, television serialization, art films, cartoons and surrealist animation and nouveau film classics, we consider fundamental questions of what changes in adaptation, how each medium tells stories, constructs human identity and experience, and how social and cultural factors affect adaptation, as well as how adaptation influences culture.
 
  French Films: An Introduction to Cinema
  This course will consider cinema as the art of movement, and violence and sensuality as manifestations of this movement. We will study the basic vocabulary of cinematographic language using films by Renoir, Vigo, Resnais and Godard. The interactions of the different mechanisms of film language will allow us to explore the creation of non-passive cinema. In addition to scheduled course meetings there is a weekly screening.
 
  French Literature and Colonialism
  In this course we will concentrate on cinematographic representations of French colonialism, French expatriates and colonized subjects in the former French colonies including west and north Africa, the Caribbean and Indochina. Beginning with early French films, like the Lumiere Brothers' footage of pyramids and "opium dens," and black and white classics like Pepe le Moko, with its images of the Algerian Casbah, we will examine how space is divided up and claimed for civilization or categorized as Other. In a search for more nuanced visions, we will study more self-critical images from contemporary French directors like Claire Denis (Chocolat, Cameroon) and Jean-Jacques Annaud (L'Amant, Indochina, La Victoire en chantant, Cameroon). From here we will move on to an examination of films made by directors from the former colonies, such as Djibril Mambety's Hyenes and Touki Bouki (Senegal), Assia Djebar's Femmes D'Alger, and Moufida Tlatl's Silences du palais (Tunisia). Throughout this course we will be concerned with the themes of estrangement and alienation, on the one hand, and the creation of hybrid identities and third spaces on the other. How far is it possible to read stereotypical images of colonized people as ironic? What conventions need to be understood for irony to succeed?
 
  Italian Cinema: "History--Genres--Directors"
 

A survey of Italian cinema in which we will watch and discuss some of the films, directors, genres and performers that Italians have liked best over the years. We will learn how to look at films in some depth, how the culture and history of Italy gave these films their distinctive character, and who all these artists are whose names end with -ini &-ani & -oni & -onti & -ucci.

We will look at movies funny and sad, political and frivolous, dramatic and melo; at films marked by the voice of distinctive directors and films that voice the concern of Italy as community and culture. Films by directors you may have heard about will be shown: de Sica, Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci; as well as films by some you should hear about too: Amelio, Bellocchio, Brusati, de Santis, Monicelli, Nichetti, Risi, Scola, Tavianis. Well known classics will take their turn: Paisa, Vivere in Pace, La Terra Trema, Senso, La Strada, 8 1/2, Red Desert, Teorema; as well as lesser known titles: C'Eravamo Tanto Amati, Notte di San Lorenzo, Riso Amaro, I Soliti Ignoti, Il Sorpasso, Pane e Cioccolata, Prima della Rivoluzione, Pugni in Tasca.