• Film 200: Anne Nesbet
• Film 240.001: Kristen Whissel
• Film 240.002: Linda Williams
• Film 240.003: Miryam Sas

Film 200
Instructor: Anne Nesbet
Tu: 11:00am - 1:00pm
226 Dwinelle Hall

Description forthcoming

Film 240, Section 1
Instructor: Kristen Whissel
Th: 12:00pm 3:00pm
226 Dwinelle Hall

This course will focus on the impact that a range of digital technologies
(from software programs such as MASSIVE to playback and streaming devices
such as DVD players and iPhones), practices, and techniques have had upon
film style, aesthetics, genre, sound, color, narrative and
characterization. As part of this project, we will focus on the
intersection of new media theory and film theory and criticism with an eye
towards discerning the most productive junctures between new media studies
and cinema studies.

Film 240, Section 2
Instructor: Linda Williams
F: 11:00am - 2:00pm
226 Dwinelle Hall

This is a graduate seminar on the musical film. You do not “gotta sing” or “gotta dance” in this class but it is important to grasp the imperative of the title. While we will begin and possibly end with the all-important Hollywood Musical, we shall use these canonical musicals as diving boards to plunge us into some less familiar territory: most importantly backwards to musical theater’s traditions in blackface performance and forward to the musical traditions of the “race film” and then further forward to the transnational contemporary forms of the musical in Bollywood, France, Denmark, South Korea and the U.S.

Readings will include:

• Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.
• Rick Altman, The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987
• D.A. Miller, Place for Us . Harvard UP, 1998.
• Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin.’ New York: Overlook Press, 1987.
• Rick Altman, ed. Genre: the Musical. London: BFI, 1981.
• Steve Cohan, Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2006.
• Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the  African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Catherine M. Cole. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
• Ann Douglas 1995. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Noonday Press.
• Forbes, Camille R. 2008. Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
• Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Lhamon, W.T. Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rogin, Michael. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Films will include:

• Applause
• Top Hat
• Swing Time
• The Jazz Singer
• The Singin’ Fool
• Wonder Bar,
• Swing!
• A Star is Born
• Hallelujah!
• Show Boat
• The Gold Diggers of 1933
• The Wizzard of Oz
• Ziegfeld Girl
• Cabin in the Sky
• Stormy Weather
• The Bandwagon
• Mother India
• Devdas
• Sopyonje
• Dancer in the Dark

Film 240, Section 3
Instructor: Miryam Sas
W: 1:00pm - 4:00pm
226 Dwinelle Hall

This seminar reads key works and theoretical concepts related to Japanese visual cultures—film, visual arts, photography, and animation. From silent cinema (and benshi narration) to experimental/New Wave works and animé, from avant-garde happenings and action art to Fluxus to contemporary internet culture, the seminar locates Japanese visual cultures in relation to central debates in Asian critical arts/film theory and contemporary critical theory.

Among the texts studied are works by: Akasegawa, Azuma, Chow, Dym, Hall, Hosoe, Hou, Jameson, Jonouchi, Lee U-fan, Lippit, Matsumoto, Miyazaki, Moriyama, Ōno Y., Ōshima, Ozu, Tatsumi, Tsuge, and others.