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2009 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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| The Craft of Writing - The Hollywood Musical (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1A.001 This course is designed as a general introduction to writing papers for film classes. The assignments are structured to give you experience writing in different academic forms; you will be asked to write a scene analysis, some short critiques, and a longer paper based on independent research. Throughout the semester, we will be devoting class time to the discussion of style, mechanics, and “process” (editing, finding a thesis, peer review, etc.). Our primary goal is to develop the core skills and techniques necessary for writing excellent essays about cinema. At the same time, we want to expose you to a range of methodologies practiced by film scholars. Our topic will be the Hollywood Musical. While watching a number of key musicals, we will read an array of articles, representing multiple perspectives on this important genre. The musical is a particularly fascinating case study, because the musical is manifestly about things that are difficult to write about - beginning with its fundamentals! Some philosophers claim that music and dance are inaccessible to written expression by their very nature. Moreover, the makers of classic Hollywood musicals often engaged with issues of sexual difference, race, mass consciousness, nostalgia, and the business side of show business, in surprising, even paradoxical, ways. For example, we might be inclined to think of the musical in strictly escapist terms. And yet, Jane Feuer has argued that the musical is the most “self-reflexive” of all Hollywood genres, because movies like Singin’ in the Rain and The Bandwagon foreground the work involved in “putting on a good show.” If many musicals tell stories about making musicals, scholars of the genre tend to be equally self-conscious about the business of film theory and criticism. How do we write about the things that give us pleasure? Are some kinds of pleasure more “acceptable” than others, from a Marxist, psychoanalytic, auteurist, queer theory, or feminist point of view? And what, exactly, is pleasure? Required Book: Rosenwasser, David, and Stephen, Jill, "Writing Analytically: Fifth Edition." Boston: Thompson and Wadsworth, 2008. ISBN - 978-0393007695
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| The Craft of Writing - Housewives and Admen, Cowboys and Aliens: Figurations of the American Post-War 50’s (& its Legacy) in Film, Literature, and Television. (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1A.002 As the first core class focused on critical reading and composition, students will formally develop the fundamental skills necessary for successful college level prose. Through close readings of both visual and literary texts and intensive editing and rewriting, students will work toward articulating and sustaining a cogently conceived and executed argument. In keeping with this desired outcome, the class itself is organized around a central theme, in this case the era of the post-war American 1950’s and its cultural legacy. Highlighting the media objects and icons of the period (predominantly in film, Television, and literature) the course will likewise investigate the trans-historical reboots and repetitions of what can broadly be defined as the era’s highly charged “image.” Why is it that certain genres such as the Western, the domestic Melodrama, and the Science Fiction adventure predominate? How do the era’s interrelated mediums transform the way we think of images? What is the cultural legacy of this distinctly American imaginary? Required Books:
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| The Craft of Writing - Film Focus: Censorship and Cinema in the U.S. (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1A.003 In the spirit of recent scholarship, this course will aim to complicate “top-down” models of censorship by focusing as much on the sites of film production and reception as on the function of the nominal censor. We will, of course, look at the content and effects of the (in)famous Production Code (as well as its precursors and its legacy), and as such we will have to begin with the classic triad of American mid-century moral preoccupation: sexuality, violence, and race relations. But more broadly, we will seek to understand the cinema’s complicity in the mediation-censorship of human experiences that involve and far exceed those three categories. That is, we will investigate the question of how the cinema has helped to channel our ways of being in the world, communicating, and understanding ourselves. In this sense, it may be possible to view censorship not as an oppressive force and a nuisance, but as an integral aspect of modern human subjectivity and social discourse as well as a potentially generative one. Lastly, we should not forget that a college writing course is itself a complicated mechanism of censorship, laying down (albeit in a rudimentary way) the rules of engagement for academic discourse. With any luck, we will be able to exploit all these instances of censorship as both the form and content of our new writing.
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| The Craft of Writing - Film Focus | |
Film R1B In this course students will examine concepts of repetition and seriality across popular media genres. Seriality, or the quality or state of succession in a series, emerged as a popular concept (serial killing, serial narrative) alongside serial film production. Repetition, a basic mnemonic device, is crucial to both our interaction with, and understanding of, narrative. We will investigate the coordinating nature of repetition and seriality in four narrative genres: Horror, Musical, Crime drama, and Comedy. How do these genres utilize repetitive motifs and serial structures? How does seriality and repetition determine what is rendered and what is left invisible? How is genre itself a repetition of serial elements? In order to examine these questions, we will look to texts such as Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and George Bataille's Story of the Eye, films such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952), and selected other tele-visual and academic sources. Emphasis will be placed on student participation and the production of three essays of increasing intensity. Required Texts:
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| History of Silent Film (This course fulfills the film major lower division history requirement) | |
| Film 25A This course provides an advanced introduction to the history of silent Required: David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film 4th Edition (NY: W.W. Norton The Silent Cinema Reader (Lee Grieveson & Peter Kramer, editors) (London: Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, (R.L. Rutsky and Geoffrey Geiger, editors) Anton Kaes, M (London: BFI Classics, 1999)
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| Moving Image Media Production | |
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Film 26 This class is to provides a basic foundation for digital video film production with hands-on instruction in the use of digital cameras and tripods, sound recording for video, basic lighting techniques and digital editing. As we work to understand what makes "strong" images that generate powerful thought and emotion, emphasis will be on the basic elements of video making: composition, light, color, relationships between sound and image, as well as various creative approaches editing such as dramatic continuity and montage. The course also explores the range of techniques and languages of creative videomaking from traditional story genres to more contemporary experimental forms. The course consists of a weekly lecture including screenings, discussion and meetings with visiting artists and crafts people. Weekly section is a production workshop in which students receive hands-on equipment instruction and produce a series of short exercises and a final project. This course provides students the technical groundwork for other courses that integrate production elements into assignments and serve as a prerequisite for the more advanced courses which focus on specific techniques and aspects of production. Required texts:
Recommended Texts:
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| The Avant-Garde Film | |
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Film 28B "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all!"--Andre Breton Avant-garde film is a cinema of subversion, of sensual perversion filled with challenging, unruly images and ideas that are often messy, sublime and like life, complicated! Avant-garde film is also a cinema of counter-culture whose filmmakers are challenging the edges of social, artistic, intellectual and sexual acceptability. Not bound by the bottom line of corporate checkbooks and middle-brow gentility, avant-garde films challenge us to see, think and feel differently. Each film is a pipe cleaner for the mind clearing out sludge from years of watching the mind numbing conventions of shopping mall cinema and info-tainment TV. The course explores the rich and varied history of films made by fine artists who use film and video as a highly personal and poetic medium as well as those who experiment with the perceptual and narrative elements of film form. Through screenings, reading, writing, the making of short filmic artworks and talking to visiting artists, we sample from the garden of underground, personal, poetic, queer, abstract, surrealist and expanded cinemas, as well as feminist, animated, structural-materialist, found films, love films and smash-the-state films! Required Texts:
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| Sophomore Seminar | |
Film 84 This seminar will investigate the modes, styles, and uses of documentary film that have developed over the past 120 years, from the earliest cinematic efforts to record "actuality" to present day deconstructions, appropriations, and parodies of traditional documentary forms and conventions. The focus of the course will largely be on American and European documentary traditions. Through screenings of representative works, and class discussions and online discussions, we will investigate how and why various historical periods have given rise to particular documentary forms and documentary agendas. We will consider the persistence and/or changing nature of documentary film conventions and strategies. The seminar will consider how the "voice" of the filmmaker is represented in his/her films. We will also explore the various ways in which documentary filmmakers use evidence and argument to tell a story, to persuade or incite audiences, or to put forward a particular view of the world. Throughout the seminar, we will consider a number of significant issues and controversies surrounding the production and consumption of documentary films, including the relationships and differences between fiction and non-fiction film; problems related to claims of representing "truth" and "reality"; the issue of documentary objectivity; the ethics of representing others; and the relationships between filmmaker, film subject, and film audience. Students willing to view films critically and to actively and creatively engage in discourse about them are encouraged to take this seminar. This seminar does not fulfill the Film Studies documentary requirement. This seminar may be used to satisfy the Arts and Literature breadth requirement in Letters and Science. Required Text: Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
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| History of Film Theory | |
Film 100 This course provides an analytical overview of the major areas of film theory indispensable for an understanding of the cinema. Topics include: antecedents of film theory, realism and formalism, auteur and genre theory, theories of spectatorship and reception, structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, queer theory, performance and star studies, postcolonialism, and cognitive theory. Our chief aim will be to integrate these methods into a responsive media studies practice, allowing students to apply a variety of theoretical approaches to a range of cinematic and other media texts. Meeting this overarching course objective will necessitate consistent class attendance, reading assigned essays thoroughly and viewing films critically, and participating fully in class discussions and exercises. There will be weekly lectures and screenings in addition to a weekly discussion section. Assignments will include extensive reading, several short papers, take-home mid-term and final exams, and regular response postings on bSpace. Required Texts: Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism, 7th Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Robert Stam. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
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| Animation | |
Film 108.002 From the silent pioneering work of Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay, and Otto Messmer, through the stop motion animation of Reiniger, Starevich, and Len Lye, and on to the feature narratives of Japanese animé, we will study the major currents in international animation. The course revisits the best-known animation studios -- Disney, the Fleischer Brothers, Warners, George Pal, and UPA -- as the producers who helped redefine and Americanize narrative fantasy. We then examine Canadian, European, Eastern European, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese studios for the experimental alternatives to the American juggernaut, and study how new forms of animation – including early digital -- respond to both political and artistic demands of avant garde movements. Along with the films, we trace the shifts and changes of animation theory as it illustrates and challenges animation practice. Required readings:
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| Japanese Horror & Beyond | |
Film 108.003 The course will begin with an exploration of the cinematic style of
Japanese horror films (J-Horror), their power to provoke and disturb, in
light of theoretical issues such as spectatorship, the fantastic and the
uncanny, and the trauma of gender and sexuality. In the latter half of
the semester, we will focus on the ways in which these films theorize
visibility/invisibility and the transmission of traumatic knowledge in the
context of their adaptation into other Asian sites (Hong Kong, South The aim of the course is to encourage a critical and theoretical understanding of Japanese horror films. Theoretical approaches include works on psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies, and feminism; the course will also emphasize close textual analysis. Readings range from Freud, Todorov, Kristeva to film theorists Barbara Creed, Tom Gunning and Vivian Sobchack. Texts:
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| Chaplin & Allen | |
Film 151.001 This course involves a comparative analysis of the lives and works of Charles Chaplin and Woody Allen, two comic film artists who wrote, directed and performed in their films. The success of both gave them unprecedented independence in the American film industry. The course is organized around a cluster of themes. Comic Theory: Why are Chaplin and Allen funny? What is it about them (or their comic personas) that makes us laugh? To what extent does their appeal alter with time? What elements in their art retain their freshness? Are Allen's and Chaplin?'s films funny for the same reasons, or do they amuse in different ways for different reasons? How useful are theories of comedy in explaining the effects of their films? What happens to their comic art when Chaplin gets political and Allen gets philosophical (and vice versa)? Does comedy simply anesthetize us against painful concerns or can it help us deal with serious issues? We will read the comic theories of Aristotle, Freud, Bergson and other more recent theorists in order to get perspectives on these questions.
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Film 151.003 What is an author? And what is an author in the context of film making, where teamwork is everything? This course will address these questions focusing on the films of Werner Herzog, and including other traveling directors with transnational careers in comparative perspective. Rescue Dawn, Herzog’s dramatized remake of his earlier documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, as well as his remake of F.W. Murnau’s classic vampire movie Nosferatu, re-open the debate about originality, imitation, and intertextuality, particularly in relation to the staging of history and war. Herzog’s interest in myth, precarious locations, cinematic experimentation, as well as his idiosyncratic approach to fiction and documentary will be recurring themes in our film analysis. We shall scrutinize formal characteristics of films while pursuing theoretical questions of aesthetic production and reception. How does an auteur become a trademark of a national cinema? In what ways can travel, dislocation, and exposure to different environments become formative forces for cinematic production? Do digital media change our conception of authorship? This last question, in particular, is crucial for an adequate understanding of Herzog’s work. More than any other director of his generation and stature, he has embraced the possibilities of digital media; in fact, his strategies of self-reflexivity in the “director’s commentaries” added to the DVD re-releases of his earlier films seem to be the logical continuation of his own staged voice within the films themselves and in “behind-the-scenes” documentaries. We will investigate the broader emergence of these digital “special features,” and consider their impact on our conception of “works” and “authors” as autonomous, discrete entities. Resources: Course Requirements: 2) Contributions to course website. Each participant will write and share brief responses (300-500 words) to two or three of the texts from that week’s reading and viewing. You will be expected to write at least 5 responses over the course of the semester and post these under the appropriate topic in the “Forum” section on the course website. These responses can be informal personal reflections inspired by the reading and viewing, but they should nonetheless be sharp, crisp, and pointed. They should highlight the main ideas in the articles, and suggest questions for discussion. In addition, each participant will contribute at least 3 film clips, photos, or weblinks, each with a brief commentary (300-500 words) that contextualizes the material and explains why it is relevant. The aim in posting these findings with commentaries is to create our own collaborative archive and make creative connections between key scenes from the films, readings, and other kinds of materials. (20 %) 3) Mid-term (take-home paper) (30 %) 4) Final take-home exam (30 %) 5) Creative work inspired by the course (short stories, film, photography, art or music) may count for extra credit and be presented in class or through the website.
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| Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Cross-listed as Rhetoric 133) | |
Film 151.004 Through their production company, The Archers, the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made approximately a dozen features of such idiosyncratic daring that Martin Scorsese has called them “the most successful experimental film-makers in the world.” It is this quality of contradiction at the center of their work—as “experimental” filmmakers operating within the context of commercial cinema, as arguably “transnational” or “exilic” filmmakers working in oblique relationship to the industrial system and dominant trends of 1940s-‘50s British cinema—that has impeded comprehensive critical and scholarly analysis of their work until recently. In Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces, Andrew Moor identifies a further crucial contradiction: The stress Powell and Pressburger laid on their creative freedom invites us to detach their work from its industrial context and to consider its uniqueness. Paradoxically, though, they emphasize collaboration, and the famous credit, ‘Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’ slaps a gauntlet down at the feet of the auteur-critic. In this course we’ll be taking up that gauntlet, examining Powell and Pressburger as an illuminating “trouble case” for auteur theory. This course will involve a lot of reading, writing, film viewing, and class participation. Screenings will include most of The Archer’s output, including The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, A Canterbury Tale, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and The Small Back Room, as well as some of the filmmakers’ pre- and post-Archers films (Contraband, Peeping Tom). Required Texts: Ian Christie and Andrew Moor, eds. The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-maker. London: BFI, 2005. Course Reader
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| Beginning Screenwriting | |
Film 180A Explores the art and craft of writing a feature length, narrative screenplay. Participants present three story ideas to the class, develop one concept into a detailed treatment and write the first act of the script in professional screenplay form. Focus is on rewriting, with regular presentations of outlines and scripts to fellow writers. Emphasis on story structure, character development and screenplay form. Includes in-class writing exercises. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required. This class is open to juniors and seniors. Preference is given to Film Studies but instructor will try to accommodate students who are not Film Studies majors. Interested students should attend the first class session. Required Texts Screenwriting: The Art Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing, by Richard Walter (Plume, 1988). ISBN 0-452-26347-6 The Hollywood Standard, by Christopher Riley (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005). ISBN 1-932907-01-7 Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay, By Syd Field (Dell, 1994) ISBN 0-440-50490-2 Books are available at Cal Student Bookstore, Ned's or at Amazon.com
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| Advanced Screenwriting | |
Film 180B Explores the art and craft of writing a feature length narrative screenplay. Participants write a detailed outline of a narrative script and then develop the material into a completed screenplay. Focus is on rewriting, with regular presentations of scenes to fellow writers. Emphasis on characterization, scene structure, visual story telling, and creating a unified script. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required. This class is open to juniors and seniors. Preference is given to Film Studies but instructor will try to accommodate students who are not Film Studies majors. Interested students should attend the first class session. Required Texts Making A Good Script Great, 2nd Edition, by Linda Seger (Samuel French, 1994) ISBN 0-573-69921-6 The Hollywood Standard, by Christopher Riley (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005). ISBN 1-932907-01-7 Screenwriting Updated, Linda Aronson (Silman-James Press)ISBN 1-879505-59-2 Story Sense: Writing Story and Script for Feature Films and Television, by Paul Lucey (McGraw-Hill, 1996). BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT CAL STUDENT BOOKSTORE, NED'S OR ON AMAZON.COM
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| Digital Video: The Architecture of Time (Cross-listed with Practice of Art C171 section 1) (This course may be used as an elective for the film major) | |
Film 185 (4 units) http://art.berkeley.edu/coursework/moses/courses/film185/ Objectives: This hands-on studio course is designed to present students with a foundation-level introduction to the skills, theories, and concepts used in digital video production. † As digital technologies continue to expand our notion of time and space, of value and meaning, new means of image and sound acquisition as well as nonlinear and nondestructive editing methods used in digital video are re-defining the architectures of time and the geographies of space. † Cinematic creation and experience have been (and continue to be) changed, and offer new and innovative possibilities for articulating new forms of the moving image. Through direct experimentation and through reading-based conceptual discussions, this course will expose students to a broad range of industry-standard equipment, film and video history, theory, terminology, field, and post-production skills. Students will be required to master the digital media tools introduced in the course, to develop a conceptual understanding of their implications, and to give personal voice to the new possibilities that digital video brings to time-based art forms. Methodology: There will be a mix of Colloquia, Lab Sessions, and Tech Demonstrations, which will culminate in the production of a final short narrative by each of the students. † Students must assume that, throughout the semester, a great deal of extra time will be required in the field and in the lab to complete all assignments. Assignments: Readings, Discussions, Lab Exercises & Field Assignments. † The latter will involve a progression of short films (Found Story-Images / Story-Places / Montage vs Longtake / In-Camera Editing, etc.) culminating in a complete short film. Attendance & Grading: Attendance at classes, labs, as well as additional lab time is not optional. † Grading will be based upon attendance and performance (conceptual as well as technical) during classes and labs and upon timely completion and evaluation of the short by-weekly assignments as well as the final project. Films: Selected shorts and sequences, as well as a few feature films, will be shown and discussed. † In doing so, we will learn to add to the articulate discussion-practice of Berkeley film majors, the perspectives and concerns of practicing film-makers. Student projects will be shown and discussed as well. Short projects as well as final one are expected to be ready on time and be posted on the class webpage portfolio. Required Texts: Course Reader
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| Special Topics in Moving-Image Production - Production Workshop: Strategies in Cinematic Continuity |
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Film 186 This workshop class will explore the design and uses of cinematic continuity through a series of video exercises, in which students will block, shoot, and edit short dramatic scenes of increasing complexity, ranging through classic Hollywood continuity, the chase, intercut scenes, jump cuts, and the creative uses of discontinuity. In post-production, students test the mutability of continuity through shot selection and sequence, pacing, and independent editing of sound.
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| Field Study at the Pacific Film Archive - "Internships for Film Majors: Independent Studies/Internship at the PFA" | |
Film 197A Mandatory group meetings at PFA. Students must schedule three hours of fieldwork per week in addition to group meetings. Prerequisites: Declared film majors with at least 60 semester units completed. Interning at the Pacific Film Archive. Interns will learn about film bibliography and research materials by attending weekly lectures and by working in the PFA Library. Interns will get a thorough orientation to the PFA Library through introductory lectures and training sessions. Then, for 3 hours per week throughout the semester, they will help organize materials for inclusion in the PFA Library's clippings files. Interns will gain experience in library organization and film bibliography, as well as a broad knowledge of the kinds of film reviews and criticism found in a variety of sources. For more information, please call Nancy Goldman at 642-0366.
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| Independent Studies/Field Study for Majors | |
Film 197B (3 units) Description forthcoming, contact instructor for further information. |
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| Film Curating Internship | |
Film 197C Description Forthcoming. Please contact instructor for further information.
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