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| Summer
2007 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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Session A (May 21 - June 29)
Session D (July 2- August 10) |
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| This course fulfills the film major lower division sound film history requirement. History of Film I: Silent Era | |
Film
25A This class is designed to provide a comprehensive history of silent and early sound cinema to film majors. What makes film such a profound visual and aural medium? How did cinema become the form of mass cultural entertainment that it is today? We will closely examine the new narrative forms of cinema. How did these forms alter existing pictorial and theatrical modes of visual display? What types of stars and pleasures did the cinema create? Which kind of cinema was the most censored? We will consider the technological, commercial, cultural and political forces that fueled the birth of the cinema, not only in the United States but in other parts of the world as well. Topics include early actualities, serials, comic shorts, Soviet cinema, German expressionism, silent film melodrama, surrealist film; race and colonialism in cinema. Screenings and class discussions will focus on developing an informed history of film styles, periods, contexts, genres and techniques. Course requirements: in-class quiz, summary-response, sequence analysis, mid-term exam and final paper. Required books: David Cook, A History of Narrative Film Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader |
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| This course fulfills the film major upper division theory requirement. History of Film Theory | |
Film 100 Since their inception, the cinema and related media have inspired a tremendous amount of philosophical and theoretical reflection--not only about the nature of the media themselves, their styles, genres, politics, history, etc., but also about the world in general. In Film 100, we will study significant selections from the history of philosophy and film theory that in a variety of ways pose the following questions: How might we engage with texts that are primarily visual and aural in the form of writing? What does it mean to write and reflect in the age of motion pictures? How might motion pictures themselves change the way we think about the world and our everyday reality? Potential texts include those by Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Henri Bergson, Arnold Gesell, Walter Benjamin, Christian Metz, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Marshall McLuhan, Linda Williams, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Zizek. Required Text: Course Reader |
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| This course fullfills the film major upper division genre requirement. The American Horror Film | |
Film 108 Taking stock of the American horror genre, from its early German Expressionist and Surrealist influences to its more recent appearances in contemporary Hollywood cinema, this course will explore both the horror film’s main currents and its multiple variations throughout the twentieth century, including its early interest in monsters and mad scientists and its post-1960 turn toward psycho killers and internal possessions. To this end, we will interrogate the horror genre’s signal characteristics: What kinds of threat does it depict and how do these change over time? How do different subgenres respond to these threats? What effects do horror films produce in their spectators? Dread? Shock? Terror? Disgust? Paranoia? Why do we find these sensations so unpleasurably pleasurable? What kinds of “cultural work” does the horror film do? To answer such questions, the course will take a film-intensive approach, carefully analyzing foundational films from horror’s “classic” era, its various convergences with film noir and science fiction, and its later secularization in “familial” horror and the slasher film. Selections from a course reader will contribute to our discussions with texts that take up the history of the horror genre, its narrative structure and spectatorial pleasures, and its links to larger social and cultural concerns, including economics and sexuality. Required Text: Course Reader |
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| This course fulfills the film major lower division silent film history requirement. History of Film II: Sound Era | |
Film 25B This course will examine the history of cinema after the coming of sound in the late 1920s. By looking at both Hollywood and world cinemas, we will examine the way in which the coming of sound affected institutional and aesthetic practices of filmmaking, as well as how these films influenced the practice of film theory. Questions to be addressed center around the idea of representation, and will include the nature of narrative, authorship and auteur theory, genre, identity politics, nationalism, realism, technology and consciousness. Required Texts: David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film Art David Cook, The History of Narrative Film |
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| This course can be used to fullfill the film major lower division documentary requirement. Documentary Film | |
Film 28A This course will trace the history of the documentary film - from the early actualities produced by the Edison and Lumière Studios, to ethnographic film and vérité, and on to the complex cine-essays of Chris Marker. We will examine key issues raised by the documentary mode in its pursuit of an evanescent “reality”: its pedagogical function vis-à-vis a dominant cinema more or less allocated to entertainment films, its relationship to narrative and argumentative strategies, and its assimilation to avant-garde and activist projects. We will be especially attentive to the “blurred boundaries” of the documentary film; we will seek out those places where documentary intersects with other sorts of film practice. The course will end with a consideration of the “mockumentary,” which appropriates doc conventions in mainstream genre contexts, mainly horror and comedy, as well as the “liberal protest film,” a subgenre that has flourished in the wake of Michael Moore’s divisive Fahrenheit 9-11. Course work will include a short response paper, a midterm, and a final project. Required Texts: Course Reader |
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| This course can be used to fullfill the film major upper division genre requirement. Criminal Genres: The Representation of Crime, Detection, and Punishment in Film since the Silent Era | |
Film 108, section 2 Beginning early on with such silent classics as The Great Train Robbery, film has fascinated audiences with the depiction of crime. The course would look at the way in which cinema focuses on crime, developing genres that sometimes parallel enormously popular literary forms such as the thriller, but adding cinematic elements that transform style and audience expectation, as in film noir. Films to be viewed would include The Great Train Robbery, Fritz Lang's M, Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia. Required Text: Course Reader |
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| This course fulfills the film major upper division auteur requirement. Alfred Hitchcock | |
Film 151 The central question which structures the course is why Alfred Hitchcock, who devoted most of his career in Hollywood to making films in the popular genre of the suspense thriller, is considered a serious film artist, a quintessential auteur. What are the qualities in the films that attract not only the movie going public but film scholars, psychologists and philosophers as well? What makes critics consider Hitchcock more than merely a master of suspense, but a serious artist of anxiety? What is the nature of the anxieties that Hitchcockís works elicit? How does Hitchcock shape the suspense-thriller genre to explore serious human concerns? In the first two weeks of the course, students will receive training in film analysis techniques in order to appreciate the formal brilliance of Hitchcockís visual style and the relation between the cinematic style and the thematic content of Hitchcock's films. We will define auteur theory and discuss the virtues and limitations of an auteur perspective on Hitchcock's work. Are there recurring themes and psychological preoccupations that inform Hitchcock's work, and, if so, what insight into Hitchcock's art is provided by an understanding and knowledge of his background and private life? Since Hitchcock's films (especially toward the latter part of his career in Psycho and Frenzy) contain images of shocking brutality, what accounts for audience pleasure in terror? Since women are often (though not always) the recipients of the violence, what insights can feminist film criticism offer into the role of the female victim in Hitchcock's art? Do Hitchcockís films support the contention that he was a misogynist, or can they be read as subversive, proto-feminist critiques of the patriarchal order? Despite Hitchcockís working within the restraints of the classical Hollywood mode of film construction with its heterosexual imperative, a significant body of his work involves unstable closures that question the happiness of the couple as well as characters coded as homosexual. How can queer theory open up new perspectives in under standing the subversive underpinnings of Hitchcockís art? Required Text : In order to gain insight into the above questions we will read... Donald Spotoís The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, a work that despite some inaccuracies is filled with fascinating background information on each of Hitchcockís films and traces obsessive themes in his work to his childhood and life experiences Tania Modleskiís penetrating psychoanalytic analyses of Hitchcockís films: The Women who Knew Too Much, which offers a critique of feminist critics who interpret Hitchcockís films as exclusively misogynistic. Robin Woodís Hitchcock Revisited, which takes up the issue of the way critical perspectives on Hitchcock changed in the seventies from humanist to ideological A course reader which include additional perspectives on Hitchcockís works. Course Requirements: 5-6 page analysis of a sequence from a Hitchcock film: Due July 20 Final Paper: Due August 17 Hitchcock Journal which records your responses to and insights into the films screened on Wednesday evenings Extra credit journal entries on recommended and required weekend screenings Regular class attendance and class participation.
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