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| Spring
2009 (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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| The Craft of Writing - Film Focus (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1B.001 This course will teach you how to write analytical essays, and do so by taking up the subject of how filmmakers and other artists have sought to represent nature, land, and our human use of it. We will begin with a brief survey of landscape painting – the last major genre of painting to develop in the West, which came of age when painters realized their backgrounds were more mysterious than their foregrounds. After that, we will briefly examine how photography intervened in the depiction of land as a way of bringing faraway lands to people, almost as a way of eliminating the need for travel. Finally, we will spend most of our course discussing the technical and aesthetic challenges filmmakers faced making films about land, the surprising solutions they came up with, the genre of the nature film, and new genre of film that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s called "pure cinema."
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| The Craft of Writing - Film Focus “Points of View”(Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1B.002 This film R1B section will focus on the “camera” as a narrative lens. We will cover a range of film theory that questions the function of the camera, its gaze, and identification, and we will also explore what the narrative lens does to stories as they move into and out of the medium of film. There will be a special emphasis on adaptation, ranging from theater to video games. In all cases, we will be interested in the subjective lens, one which is explicitly and repeatedly implicated in the image’s narrative events. We will view films which utilize a subjective point of view throughout, films which use it occasionally for specific effects (such as horror or murder-mystery films), and even several first-person video games which make their own claims about the subjective nature of the “camera.” This section of film R1B is, like all other R1B’s, primarily a writing class. We will prepare our students to write college-level essays that are focused, persuasive, and that make use of supporting materials covered in class. Students will learn how to read both images as well as challenging scholarly texts which explore important theoretical and historical themes in film studies. Books: Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (Philip Rosen, Columbia University Press, 1986)
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| The Craft of Writing - Film Focus Letters on Film(Satisfies reading and composition requirement) | |
Film R1B.003 Office Hours: 6220 Dwinelle This course will teach students how to think and write analytically about film. Students will begin with two short argumentative essays that will eventually lead to a longer research paper. Letters in different forms—personal letters, notes or memos, diaries or memoirs, newspaper clippings, emails or even home videos and documentaries will serve as our primary criteria of research. The goal will not be to think of letters as material for cinematic adaptation but to ask how letters animate cinema as new media— how they function as dynamic modes of story-telling in both written and visual texts. We will start by reading sentimental fiction and then move to letters as objects that produce comedy, horror, documentary or experimental images in cinema. Class discussions will emphasize close reading of texts; written assignments will revolve around writing and editing papers into polished essays. Books: Films:
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| The History Film (This course fulfills the film major lower division history requirement - Part Two.) | |
| Film 25B In this introductory survey course we will examine the history of cinema from the silent-to-sound revolution of the late 1920s through the international development of film as a transformative technology, art form, and commercial medium up to the present time. Drawing from Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction as well as the scholarship of film historians/theorists Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, Miriam Hansen, John Belton, Hamid Naficy, Thomas Elsaesser, Henry Jenkins, and many others, we will be discussing the way certain landmark short and feature films reflected social, political, and ideological changes through the decades. The objectives of this course are to: 1. Familiarize the students with the major technological and aesthetic innovations of the past 80 years which have given rise to the cinema as we know it today; 2. Foster students’ awareness of the economic, social and political contexts in which sound cinema developed and the impact which cinema had, in turn, on nations, cultures, and historical events; and 3. Give students a clear sense of the major movements in sound cinema (including classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema, experimental and avant-garde cinema, Weimar cinema, Italian Neo-Realism, French Poetic Realism and New Wave, Third World Cinema, Political Cinema of the 1960s-‘70s, and film in the era of global multimedia) and how those movements intertwined with critical, theoretical, and popular responses to the medium. Course requirements will include mid-term and final exams, regular bSpace postings, and mandatory class and screening lab attendance. Required Texts
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| Documentary Film | |
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Film 28A This course surveys the history, theory and practice of the documentary film (and video). What do we mean by this term? How has it changed since the beginning of cinema? What are its major modes? We will survey the history of documentary, and we will move between classic works of the genre and more experimental works. We will examine the truth claims of these works across a range of practices and reconsider the uses and consequences of strategies within the genre: cinema verite, direct cinema, narrational documentary, autobiography, investigative documentary and recent fictional styles that combine the essayistic with the observational. In each type we will examine the intersection of competing and often contradictory forces that documentary brings together: history/memory, evidence/argument, and truth/fiction. Our goal will be to travel the porous borders of a genre that promises reality by way of representation and objective truth by way of subjective perspective. Requirements: 15% Class Participation and Attendance in all lectures and discussions.
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| Intoduction To Film for Non Majors | |
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Film 50 Film 50 is an introductory course designed for non majors, members of the Berkeley community, and students considering the film major at Berkeley who want to explore the history and aesthetics of the film medium. The films chosen for screening illustrate distinctive directorial styles, film genres and/or national cinema styles. By concentrating on the historical development of filmic mise-en-scene, the photographic image, editing, cinematography, and the relation of sound to the image, students learn to view film as a complex picture language and to understand how the combination of sound and image articulate filmís narrative, psychological, social and ideological purposes. This yearís structuring theme will be the representation of children and childhood in film. Lectures and screenings will take place at the Pacific Film Archive Theater at Bancroft and Bowditch on Wednesday afternoons from 3-6. Required discussion sections meet on Fridays from 8-9:30; 9:30-11; 11:00-12:30; 12:30-2; 2-3:30; and from 3:30-5 in room188 Dwinelle. TEXTS David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th edition. Film 50 Course Reader (available at Replica Copy, 2138 Oxford) ASSIGNMENTS Midterm: 6-8 page Term Paper Final Exam Additional assignments such as journals or response papers, shot analysis exercises, class presentations, and quizzes will be given by section leaders.
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| What's So Great About The Wire? | |
Film 105 Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon’s The Wire was “the best TV show ever broadcast in America”--not the most popular but the best. The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been aptly been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. These comparisons attempt to get at the richly textured complexity of the work, its depth, its bleak tapestry of an American city and its diverse social stratifications. Yet none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling “show” on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will explore these comparisons, analyze episodes from the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons and try to discover what was and is so great about The Wire. We will screen as much of the series as we can during our mandatory screening sessions and approach it through the following lenses: the other writing of David Simon, including his journalism, an exemplary Greek Tragedy, Dickens’ Bleak House and/or parts of Balzac’s Human Comedy. We will also consider the formal tradition of episodic television. Please come to the first class having already viewed all of season one on your own. It is available at the MRC. Requirements: One orally delivered book report; one sequence analysis; one short paper (6 pages); one final paper (12 pages). Readings may include: Aeschylus, The Oresteia, Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy, Richard Price, Clockers Charles Dickens, Bleak House A Course Reader of essays on The Wire
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| Art House Cinema in the United States: 1946-1966 | |
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Film 108.001 It ranks among the greatest onslaughts on American culture in the
twentieth century – a sustained twenty-year blitzkrieg of foreign films
that radically transformed conceptions of what narrative film could do,
how filmmaking could be described, and how film could be discussed. Building on models created in the silent film era and in the skin flick
trade, the art house cinema was cast not only as an alternative to
Hollywood and the avant garde, but also as a distinct kind of modernism. We will study fourteen art house blockbusters and their directors– among
them Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, Bergman, Polanski, and Satyajit
Ray – and learn how their films were absorbed into American culture. In
the process we will analyze how auteurism emerged as a response to genre
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| Anime (Cross-listed as Comp Lit 170 & Japanese 185) | |
Film 108.002 This course is an introduction to Japanese animation, or anime, from its earliest forms (in relationship to manga) to recent digital culture, art, and games. We will analyze and study mainly animated feature films and read the critical work they inspired. We will address such issues as cultural memory and apocalyptic imagination, robots and the post-human, cities, nature, and the transnational; gender, shôjo, and the aesthetics of “cute,” as well as consider specific issues in the theoretical understanding of anime within technology and media theory.
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| Films on Films/Novels on Film (Cross-listed as Italian Studies 175.001) | |
Film 108.003 Course taught in English BREADTH REQUIREMENTS: Arts & Literature A course on self reflexive cinema and the role of film-themes and film-form in the novel. The course will examine a wide array of literary writing which is informed by film-mimetics and by the treatment of film as subject matter. This type of novel, first attempted by Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello in Shoot (1914), was subsequently practiced by a wide range of writers. These works will be juxtaposed to films that stress their own status as cinematic artifacts. Films such as Fellini: 8½ and novels such as Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark will be studied in the context of each other and of classical film theory. Films that stress their own status as cinematic artifacts, and novels that respond to the evolving art of cinema will lead to an examination of what takes place when the medium itself is at the center. For further information, please contact Prof. Moses at: gavrimos@socrates.berkeley.edu. Texts
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| Asian Horror Film (Cross-listed as East Asian Languages and Cultures 180.001) | |
Film 108.004 This course assumes the student’s familiarity with classical horror films, European and American films to be precise, and the attendant theories on genre and spectatorship. While the theoretical speculations have taken American and European films as their models, they seem totally unprepared for the vibrant horror films emerging from Asia, India to Japan, and this is exactly our charge for the course—to better understand the cinematic style of Asian horror films. As any cinephile would testify while these films have the stock figures of ghosts and monsters, haunted houses, possessed women, and disasters they also question our settled ideas of beauty and disgust that imperceptibly shape our notions of racial, sexual, and national differences. Required texts: (Available at Amazon.com)
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| Sound | |
Film 140.001 This course will explore the nature, evolution, use, and abuse of sound in cinema. From the first silent films, which weren’t presented in silence at all, to current ride films, the relation between sound and image will be analyzed in detail. While there is a high degree of visual sophistication in audiences and academic analysis, there is an almost equal naiveté when it comes to sound. Starting with the physics of sound, the neurophysiology of hearing, and how our perception influences our emotional reactions, we will consider the three main categories of film sound - dialogue, music, effects - from the perspectives of the writer, the director, and the audience, looking at the artistic and technical factors that guide and constrain the creative process, as well as how changes in presentation have affected audience response. Examples will be shown from foreign and domestic feature, documentary, and animated films. Depending on schedules, there will be several guest lectures by directors and editors currently working on the soundtracks of their films, as well as a field trip to Skywalker Sound in Marin, where the processes involved in creating a soundtrack for a feature will be demonstrated. This provides a unique opportunity to isolate the sonic elements presented in class, explore other alternatives to the finished product, and discuss why final choices were made. At the end of the course, students should be able to bring an increased sophistication and depth to their understanding of how sound contributes to (or diminishes!) the filmic experience. Requirements: Attendance and consciousness at class lectures and film screenings are mandatory. Midterm Exam, final exam, 2 quizzes, several short analyses of assigned films, and small group creation and presentation of audio scenes illustrating concepts covered in class.
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| The Religious Imagination in Cinema | |
Film 140.002 "In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it." --Walter Benjamin The art of Cinema emerged with the dawn of the 20th century, a moment when the domination of religious thought and their institutions were being deeply challenged. Modern developments in science, philosophy and politics changed forever age old questions of existence and thus the way artists explore the the changing experience of the religious in modern life. Defining the "religious imagination" in the broadest terms, this course looks at how film artists have used this most modern of art forms to explore the problem of (re)presenting the ineffable and the limits of what can be thought. In doing so, such filmmakers raise vital questions which are at once philosophical, political, aesthetic and intensely personal. Often driven to create new cinematic forms to express their unique ideas more powerfully, some of the most radical filmmakers have used the film medium to evoke--indeed create--religious experiences for viewers. Others have used film to critique the often oppressive and hypocritical manifestations of religion. Through the films and assigned readings, the class will look at the ways film artists from all over the world explore and challenge the religious imagination in the midst of the vast cultural, political and technological changes of the last hundred years.
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| Novel Into Film: Analysis of Adaptations and Principles of Adaptation (Cross-listed as Rhetoric 128) | |
Film 140.004 In this course, we will the unique intersection between written literary texts and the complex performances that are modern films. Although our films cover a fairly broad range of genres, they are all firmly within the Hollywood tradition of filmmaking. Among the questions that we may explore are:
Our focus will be on reading texts and viewing films. The concern is less with developing complicated models of analysis than with developing deep and rich analyses of film adaptations. Through a series of written exercises, we will consider both the process of producing an adaptation as well as analyzing a completed adaptation. There will be regular fairly short written assignments as well as a longer final paper. You will be required to attend screenings, participate in class discussions, and post to the class website on a regular basis. Requirements: There will be regular fairly short written assignments as well as a longer final paper. You will be required to attend screenings, participate in class discussions, and post to the class website on a regular basis Required Textbook(s):
(Additional assigned readings will be provided as part of a course reader or as class handouts.)
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| Jean-Luc Godard (Cross-listed as Rhetoric 133) | |
Film 151.001 This course will be devoted to the work of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard is not only a great filmmaker, but also one of the most important representatives of the twentieth century. He has reinvented cinema many times over, both in his early criticism, and in each new chapter of his filmmaking career. He has shown that cinema can be as aesthetically and intellectually complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Martin Heidegger’s On the Way to Language, and we will attempt to do justice to this complexity. We will screen and discuss representative works from each period in Godard’s oeuvre, beginning with Breathless, and ending with In Praise of Love. This course is not for the faint-hearted; both the screenings and the discussions will be extremely challenging.
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Film 151.002 This class examines the evolution of film style in the work of specific Soviet directors: Eisenstein, Vertov, Kozintsev and Trauberg, and Kuleshov. We will start with a look at the work of Evgenii Bauer (before the Revolution), continue with the revolutionary (and Revolutionary) experiments of our Soviet directors during the 1920’s, and conclude with a study of how each of our directors dealt with the transition into the sound era. Texts: TBA Prerequisites: Consent of instructor.
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| Steven Spielberg | |
Film 151.003 Steven Spielberg as one of the most financially successful and popular filmmakers of all time is often dismissed as a mere popular culture technician more concerned with making blockbusters than films having artistic, philosophical or social value. This course will explore Spielberg as an 'Auteur' and his terrific impact on filmmaking itself from the business of film to the technology of how it is made. We will especially focus on recurrent themes in his work that explore popular culture, technology, and science and society.
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| Auteur Eye / Director "i": The Components of Authorship in Cinema. | |
Film 151.004 http://studio.berkeley.edu/coursework/moses/Courses/ This auteur course will take a route opposite to the usual one. Rather than deriving the elements that add up to the distinctive features of one or another director by studying them individually, we will look at all the elements of filmmaking that a director has available, and from which she selects some in particular to say what he has to say in their own particular and distinctive way. We usually teach auteur courses based on the notion that one can get to know directors by watching a whole bunch of their films. One may ask why, so many years after the "death of the author," we still use the rubric "auteur" at all. In fact, there are many good reasons to do so. But not all of the relevant aspects of authorship can be addressed by the usual approach. Reversing perspectives, and asking for once "what are the possible alternatives" open to any director in making a film, tends to reveal factors we don't think about often enough. It is not as if the options available to a director are infinite. Much as with the proverbial eight notes that every composer must work with, the making of films boils down to a limited (and limiting) number of elements. Most of these, moreover, are not directly within the competence of most directors. It is these we will use as our point of departure, exploring the manifold ways in which the basic components of film technology and film language can, in the end, add up to differing and idiosyncratic results. We will do this by looking at theory, fiction, poetry, at feature films--cutting edge as well as conventional--and at shorts and at TV items and, of course, at the work of individual directors. At first glance all this reverse engineering may not seem to be helpful at all, in thinking about what it takes to be an auteur, or at least a director with something to say that is different and personal. By the end we will find that this approach will have told us a great deal about authorship in cinema.
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| Screenwritting | |
Film 180A Please note:Instructor approval is required. Preference is given to Film Studies and Art Practice Majors. Consent of instructor. This class is open to juniors and seniors; will accommodate students who are not Film Studies majors. Interested students should attend the first class session. 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. Required Texts Paul Lucey, Story Sense: Writing Story and Script for Feature Films and Telelvision; The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats, Part I: The Screenplay (CMC Publishing); Syd Field, Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT STUDENT BOOKSTORE, NED'S OR ON AMAZON.COM
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| Digital Video: The Architecture of Time | |
Film C185 This hands-on course explores the process of making narrative shorts using digital video production. Students will write, storyboard, shoot and edit four short films (2 - 7 minutes). Lecture topics include how to write an effective short script; storyboarding; working with the digital video camera; directing actors and camera; continuity and coverage; composition; lighting; sound design; fundamentals of video editing and editing esthetics. Class members work outside of class in assigned "crews" to shoot projects and edit in the media lab outside of class as well. Dailies and cuts are screened in class and critiqued by both the instructor and fellow filmmakers. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required. This class is open to juniors and seniors. Preference is given to Film Studies and Art Practice majors but instructor will try to accommodate students with other majors was well. Interested students should attend the first class session. Required Texts:
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| Field Study at the Pacific Film Archive | |
Film 197A Description TBA
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| Field Studies for Majors | |
Film 197B Description TBA
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| Film Curating Internship | |
Film 197C First Meeting: Thursday, 4 - 5pm Meet in PFA's Research Screening Room at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. Prerequisites: Declared film majors with at least 60 semester units completed; must have completed Avant Garde Film 28B. Professor approval required; enrollment limited. Experience "behind-the-scenes" at PFA! Interns will learn about film curating through creating a program of works by Bay Area film students to present at PFA the following Fall semester. Students will solicit films and videos, preview, and make a final selection as a group. Students will write short anlayses of local film exhibition programs and will do projects related to PFA's ongoing exhibition program.
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