 |
|
| Spring 2009 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
|
| Film Historiography | |
Film 201 This course will investigate of a range of methodologies and approaches
for writing film histories. Each week we will focus on recent examples of
historiography, a specific area of historical investigation (the industry,
spectatorship, genre history, the individual film, the individual
director, the cultural history of a medium, the star system, genre
history, the rise of competing media, etc.), and the various questions
about the practice of film historiography raised by both. At the same
time, this course will provide the opportunity for graduate students to
develop a detailed and nuanced knowledge of film history. Throughout, our
analyses of specific methodologies and approaches will be accompanied by
investigations of available resources, archives, film catalogues and
databases essential for primary and secondary film historical research. We
will also address pertinent issues such as: the place of film analysis in
film histories; the relationship between theory and history; the
significance of biographical information in the study of film directors; Required Books: (Books are available at the ASUC Bookstore or on Amazon.com) Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post-War Charles O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations Murray Pomerance,
|
|
| Graduate Production Seminar | |
Film 230 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. |
|
 |
|
| Installations, Projections, Divagations (Cross-listed as Rhetoric 250) | |
|
Film 240.001 This course will be devoted to a range of contemporary artists, all whom make works that are time-based, like cinema, but that are exhibited in museums and galleries, instead of a movie theater: Tacita Dean, Omer Fast, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Turner, Anri Sala, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Anne Walsh and Paul Chan. Some of these artists use film, others rely on digital cameras and computers, and yet others combine one medium with another, but they are all formally inventive and conceptually challenging. Kentridge will be in residence for a short period in the spring, and Chan will be participating in a public conversation at BAM in February. I am hoping that both will meet with us, and that I can also persuade several of the other artists to visit our class. (Fast, Turner and Sala have all expressed an interest in doing so.) Most of the works we will be studying cannot be rented or purchased, and I will not be able to lend them out, or make copies of them. We will also discuss some of the shorter pieces immediately after viewing them. The screenings will therefore be an indispensable and non-negotiable part of this course. Admission by permission of instructor.
|
|
| Toward a Critical Theory of Media: The Frankfurt School and Film | |
|
Film 240.002 This seminar will focus on the critical writings on film and photography by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. We shall engage in close readings of both classical and lesser-known texts, as well as complicate our readings with pertinent examples from film history. We will try to contextualize their arguments by relating them to the contemporaneous theories of Georg Simmel, Bert Brecht, Ernst Jünger, Sergei Eisenstein, et al. We shall also study the influence and legacy of critical media theory in Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, and Harun Farocki. All texts are in English translation.
|
|
| Experimental Film and Video | |
Film 240.003 For heuristic purposes, this course will assume that the production and reception of experimental films and videos are in stark opposition to commercial films, studio products, and state subsidized films. Framed in this oppositional manner, the course will look at various international sites of production and reception that include the historical avant-garde, the experimental documentary, video art, artisanal films, and so on. The charge for us is to understand how these moving images and the attendant critical discourses draw our attention to questions pertaining to the ontological state of cinema.
|
|
 |
|