• 200: Film Theory - Linda Williams
• 230: Graduate Production Seminar - Jeffrey Skoller
• 240, Section 1: Time-Based Photography (Cross listed as Rhetoric 243) - Kaja Silverman
• 240, Section 2: Theory and History of Digital Visual Effects - Kristen Whissel
• 240, Section 3: What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? - Nietzsche: The Madman - Greg Niemeyer

Instructor: Linda Williams

Description forthcoming

Instructor: Jeffrey Skoller

This semester long intensive covers the basic elements of film and digital video making, and is designed for graduate scholars and artists with varying or no experience in film/video production. The goal of the course is to enable students to film and edit their own productions, to gain a working overview of the production process in the context of their own scholarly/aesthetic research, and to enhance their ability to teach introductory film/video production. The course covers use of digital video cameras, lighting, and microphones, as well as other formats for image capture such as still cameras, 16mm, and super 8mm, that can be used in a digital post-production environment. The aesthetic focus will be on the basic elements of image making: composition, lighting, color, rhythm, and relationships between sound and image, working to understand what makes "strong" images that generate powerful thought and affect. The class will explore practices of film/video editing - how to organize filmic materials, emphasizing formal structure and various approaches to montage and continuity - while learning digital editing programs such as Final Cut Pro. The course will also address problems and approaches to the distribution, exhibition, and funding of non-commercial media art.

The weekly class will be structured around the exercises produced by the class to be as the basis for discussion and critique as well as hands-on technical workshops, film/video screenings, assigned readings and presentations by occasional visiting artists and speakers. Required work will consist of a series creative exercises, a group project, and a final project, which can be linked to projects for other courses in which you are enrolled.

imited production equipment will be available for the course, but expect to pay a minimum of $100.00 for materials in addition to a required textbook and reader.

Instructor: Kaja Silverman

Photography is often associated with the “mortification” or “mummification” of time. Roland Barthes also emphasizes its anteriority—the stubborn way in which it keeps saying: “this was.” Recently, though, a number of visual artists have begun to experiment with other kinds of photographic temporality. Some of them use photographs to create series, sequences, or essays.  Others combine them in a way that volatilizes the still image, or precipitates other kinds of movement. Yet others re-temporalize the still photograph by layering it with paint or other photographs. In this course, we will read the classic works on photographic temporality, but our primary concern will be these new, “time-based” photographic forms. Our approach will be aesthetic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political, and one of the issues to which we will constantly return is what distinguishes them from cinema.

We will study works by Jeff Wall, Allan Sekula, Lorna Simpson, Bill Henson, Louise Lawler, Roni Horn, Sebastio Salgado, Tracey Moffatt, Gerhard Richter, and—if logistically possible—James Coleman;  and read texts by Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Christian Metz, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Gerhard Richter, and Mieke Bal.

Instructor: Kristen Whissel

This course will provide theoretical and historical analysis of digital visual effects in contemporary cinema. Our analysis will be organized around the textual significance of five visual effects tendencies found in numerous films made between the early 1990s and the present: the increased exploitation of the screen's vertical axis; the rise of the digital "multitude"; the proliferation of artificial beings (i.e. synthespians); new forms of bodily and material plasticity; and the creation of digital imaginary worlds. While some attention will be paid to the technologies and processes that make such effects possible (wire removal software, particle animation, green screens, motion capture, etc.) we will for the most part focus on the visual, narrative and aesthetic effects of these processes and will situate each within the history of special and optical effects. Readings will draw from film theory and history, theories of digital media, theories of the body, time and space, trade/industry periodicals (such as American Cinematographer, Cinefex, and Computer Graphics World, etc.).

Instructor: Greg Niemeyer

In this graduate seminar, students apply analytical tools of critical theory to games, in particular electronic games. Beyond the framework of games as an audio-visual media experience, students analyze games as loci of performance, complete with performers, texts, media assets, and audiences. Course texts range from Schiller, F.  and Piaget, J. to Juul, J.  and offer a basis for research, but students will engage in game analysis through game play, playtesting and game design, especially in the second half of the semester.

Reading List:

Schiller, F. (1794) Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters).

Piaget, J. (1962). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton.

Huizinga, Johan. (1938) Homo Ludens. Caillois, R. (1958) Les Jeux et les Hommes. Juul, J. (2006) Half-Real. MIT Press