• Film 1A, Sec 1: Reading & Composition--Meredith Hoy and Kristen Loutensock
  
• Film 1A, Sec 2: Reading & Composition--Scott Ferguson and Norman Gendelman
  
• Film 1A, Sec 3: Reading & Composition--Andrew Moisey
  
• Film 25A: Film History 1: Silent Film History--Kristen Whissel
  
• Film 25B: Film History 2: Sound Film--
  
• Film 28B: The Avant-Garde Film--Jeffrey Skoller
  
• Film 39: Freshman/ Sophomore Seminar--Linda Rugg
• Film 84: Sophomore Seminar: From Real to Reel: The History and Development of Documentary Film--Gary Handman
  
• Film 100: Film Theory--Anne Nesbet
  
• Film 105: Senior Seminar: Film and Psychoanalysis--Marilyn Fabe
  
• Film 108, Sec 1: Film Genre: Politics of American Film Comedy--Kristen Whissel
  
• Film 108, Sec 2: Film Genre: Screening Sex--Linda Williams
• Film 108, Sec 3: Film Genre: Science Fiction Film--Felipe Gutterriez
• Film 108. Sec 4: Film Genre: The Western
• Film 140: Special Topics: Cinema Through the Lens of Distribution --Alex Cohen

• Film 151, Sec 1: Auteur Theory: Sternberg, Lang, and Preminger--Kaveh Askari
  
• Film 151, Sec 2: Auteur Theory: Ozu and Oshima--Miryam Sas
• Film 151, Sec 3: Auteur Theory: Cronenberg
  
• Film 160: National Cinema: India--Sudipto Chatterjee
  
• Film 180A: Screenwriting: Writing Workshop--J. Mira Kopell
  
• Film 180B: Advanced Screenwriting: Writing Workshop--J. Mira Kopell
  
• Film 185: Digital Video-: The Architecture of Time--Gavriel Moses
  
• Film 197A: Internships for Film Majors: Independent Studies/Internship at the PFA-- Nancy Goldman
  
• Film 197B: Independent Studies/Field Study for Majors--Marilyn Fabe
  
• Film 197C: Film Curating Internship--Kathy Geritz

Film 1A, Sec 1 (4 units)
The Craft of Writing - Film Focus
Instructor:

Required Texts

Film 1A, Sec 2 (4 units)
The Craft of Writing - Film Focus
Instructor: Scott Ferguson and Norman Gendelman

This course is designed to train students in the skills of critical thinking, as well as college-level academic reading and writing. In effort to particularize this aim, our course will take up a rigorous study of recent American cinema and literature with the goal of assessing the aesthetic, political, and philosophical stakes of our contemporary moment. Through close analysis and extensive peer commentary and rewriting, students will learn to make sophisticated arguments about a number of written and visual materials drawn from the current cultural imaginary. The syllabus will offer a sampling of recent films, including Munich (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Devil's Rejects (2005), Junebug (2005), Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), History of Violence (2005), and The Da Vinci Code (2006), as well as literary works, such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). (This list is subject to change in order to meet the needs of the class.)

Required Texts

Film 1A, Sec 3 (4 units)
The Craft of Writing - Film Focus
Instructor: Andrew Moisey

What are the movies we like to watch really about?   Are they just fantastic stories about mobsters, or aliens, or cowboys, or teenagers?   What if our favorite flicks turned out to be complex works of art--artworks with the astonishing power to decide what it should mean to be an American?   What if the United States was so immense that it actually needed movies to teach its increasingly diverse and divided citizenship how to act as one nation?   And what does it mean if the rest of the world likes our movies even more than we do?

These are some of the difficult questions that American filmmaking has provoked for more than one hundred years.   Their answers are complicated, and require a close examination not only of the rhetoric of filmmaking technique, but also of the intricate ethnic, religious, regional, and familial identities that unite and divide us.   Over the course the semester we will attempt to answer these difficult questions by dissecting a collection of American films as diverse as the U.S. itself.  

This course is designed to refine your abilities to think critically about the image America portrays to itself and to the rest of the world through its movies.   To this end, we will perform close readings of films and clips, and incorporate into our discussions articles about America in film written by renowned film scholars and social theorists.   Most importantly, we will pay particular attention to the practice of critical writing.

Required Texts

Film 25A (4 units)
Instructor: Kristen Whissel

This course provides an advanced introduction the history of silent film from the late nineteenth century until the early sound era of the late 1920s and early 1930s. We will focus on the development and institutionalization of film aesthetics and industrial practices, the emergence of narrative forms, film genres and styles, and the implementation of various modes of production and forms of spectatorship in Europe and the United States. Topics will include: commercialized leisure in the nineteenth century; the cinema of attractions; nickelodeons and censorship; the emergence of narrative film; silent film comedy; sensation melodramas and serial films; racial politics and American film of the teens; silent documentary; Weimar cinema and German Expressionism; Soviet cinema; the rise of sound in Europe and the US. Throughout the semester we will place individual films within the socio-cultural contexts into which they emerged and were consumed.

Required Text

David Cook, A History of Narrative Film; Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, The Silent Cinema Reader

Film 25B
Instructor:

Required Texts

Film 28B (3 units)
Instructor: Jeffrey Skoller

Beauty Shall be Convulsive!! --Artaud

Avant-garde film is a cinema of subversion, of sensual perversion, filled with constantly challenging, unruly images and ideas that are often messy and sublime and like life, complicated! Not bound by the bottom line of corporate checkbooks and middle-brow gentility, avant-garde cinema challenges us to see, think and feel differently. Each film is a pipe cleaner of the mind clearing out sludge from years of watching the mind numbing conventions of shopping mall cinema and infantilizing info-tainment TV. The course will focus on the cinema of counter-culture, exploring the edges of social, intellectual, sexual, perceptual and technical acceptability. Through viewings of film and videos, reading of word texts and talking to visiting artists, we move back and forth between historical and contemporary practices sampling from the garden of experimental, underground, personal, poetic, queer, surrealist cinemas, feminist, structural-materialist, punk, found films, love films and smash-the-state films....

Required Text

Film 39 (2 unit, Pass/Not Pass only)
Instructor: Linda Rugg

The Scandinavians have been important and productive participants in the global film industry from the silent era through Bergman, and today some of Europe's most provocative films are made by Scandinavians. Scandinavian films are characterized by a striking use of light and color, intense engagement with ideas surrounding sexuality, politics, and spirituality, and an inquiry into how cinema performs as a narrative art. Come learn about the culture of Scandinavia as exposed in the films of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Emphasis will be on films produced within the past ten years, but we will also view films by Ingmar Bergman and from the silent era.

Films to be screened include: Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden,1957), The Man without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland), Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamar, Norway), Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden), Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark), Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, Norway, later remade in Hollywood), Together (Lukas Moodysson, Sweden), The Five Obstructions (Lars von Trier-really--Denmark), Reconstruction (Christoffer Boe, Denmark), and The Cuckoo (Russia/Finland).

Requirements: One two-hour film screening and one one-hour class discussion per week (10 weeks, beginning 8/28). Active participation in discussion required. Short (one page or less) writing assignments in reaction to films. Students must enroll in this course with a Pass/Not Pass option

Required Texts

Film 84 (2 units)
Instructor: Gary Handman

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.

Note: This course will not fulfill the documentary requirement for the Film Studies major.

Film 100 (4 units)
Instructor: Anne Nesbet

In this course, designed as an introduction to film theory, we will survey some of the philosophical, theoretical, and critical literature inspired in this century by the cinema. Our approach will be both "diachronic," in the sense that we will be following changes in film-thought over time, and "synchronic," since we will be pausing to consider selected thematic and methodological clusters whose parameters are not exclusively determined by chronology.

Required Text

Philip Rosen, editor, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Film 105 (4 units)
Instructor: Marilyn Fabe

In this seminar we will explore the insights psychoanalysis offers to explore the questions: What makes the cinema so attractive and fascinating to the human psyche? How do we explain the powerful effects films have on our intellects and emotions? What is the relationship between the experience of watching a film and the experience of dreaming?   What light does psychoanalysis shed on how race and gender are constructed in films?

In order to explore these questions we will study foundational texts in psychoanalysis along with seminal essays in Film Studies that use psychoanalysis as a means of understanding the unique and specific power and appeal of the film medium to the human psyche. The readings will be integrated with film screenings so that we may test out the explanatory power of psychoanalysis with concrete examples.

Required Texts

Peter Gay, A Freudian Reader; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier; Course Reader

Film 108, Section 1 (4 units)
Instructor: Kristen Whissel

This course provides an historical overview and theoretical inquiry into the politics of American film comedy from the silent era to the "New Hollywood." Whether providing a flexible structure for addressing and expressing a demand for social change around questions of racial, sexual, class and gendered identity or providing a palatable and even pleasurable format for the containment of such demands, film comedy has historically been a genre through which we can read significant changes within the film industry and American culture. Topics include slapstick comedy, the sex comedy, screwball, cross-dressing films, war and comedy, etc. Directors include Keaton, Chaplin, Lubitsch, Wilder, etc. Readings will include theories and histories of film comedy, debates around film censorship and sexuality, feminist film criticism and theory, genre theory, industrial histories (on the star system, technology, exhibition practices and industry censorship), queer theory, and African-American film criticism.

Required Texts

Film 108, Section 2 (4 units)
Instructor: Linda Williams

As the sexual revolution of the sixties has continued to spread (ebbing and flowing in the manner of most revolutions), increasingly "graphic" and diverse depictions of sex have lent an overall greater visibility to sex acts in the movies. Since the sixties, explicit sex acts have become increasingly visible on movie screens and in videos made for home viewers.  We now expect to learn something from the movies about the quality and kind of sex that characters experience--whether simulated or real, heterosexual or homosexual, hard or soft core.   But how shall we understand the history of the rise of graphic sex in the movies? Does it represent an increasing "liberation" of libido or a greater discipline of bodies and pleasures? In dialogue with major theorists and historians of sexuality, this course examines the post-sixties visibility of sex acts on screen through the various genres of films that have represented sex acts: sexploitation, blaxploitation, European and Asian art films, avant-garde, pornography, and Hollywood's own unique history of occasional sexual interludes. We will understand the term screening as both a revealing projection on a screen and as a concealing screening off.

Possible Films

Andy Warhol, Kiss, Couch, Blue Movie
Mike Nichols, The Graduate (1967)
Hal Ashby, Coming Home (1978)
Melven Van Peoples, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971)
Oshima Nagisa, In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
Catherine Breillat, A Ma Soeur (Fat Girl) (1999)
Patrice Chereau, Intimacy (2000)
Bernardo Bertolluci, Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Gerard Damiano, Deep Throat (1972)
Pedro Almodóvar, La Ley del deseo (1987)
Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Required Texts

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Georges Bataille, Erotism; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex

Film 108, Section 3 (4 units)
Instructor: Felipe Gutterriez

The aim of this course is to develop an understanding of theories of film genre in conjunction with an emphasis on science fiction film. We will examine key moments in the history of science fiction film within both a cinematic context as well as a wider societal and cultural context. Participants in the course will be asked to identify dominant themes of the genre and link them to the formal characteristics typical of science fiction films. There will be two short papers and one longer paper. Attendance at lectures and film screenings is required. If this is a problem for you, you should not take this class. 

Required Texts

Film 108, Section 4 (4 units)
Instructor:

Required Texts

Film 140 (4 units)
Instructor: Alex Cohen

Cinema is undergoing a tremendous shift in how it is created, edited and distributed. While cinema distribution technologies evolved substantially even in the medium's infancy, digitization has virtually exploded these means and their possibilities in ways inconceivable before the VCR.

The videocassette, by bringing Film into the home was only the start of the obliteration between video and film - inexpensive digital video equipment and High Density Video have now nearly effaced the distinctions between video and film and more recently digital compositing has gone further and fused live-action and computer animation. Copyright laws have been unable to stop the proliferation of unauthorized DVD's and the
internet has allowed digitized feature length films to be distributed throughout the world and beyond the reach of the studios. The digital era upends the status quo of broadcast media and the studio system and replaces it with video-on-demand across an increasingly broad range of devices such as the PC, TiVo and portable video players.

This course will provide the historical background necessary to understand the sociological, cultural and technological transformations of cinema and its distribution. We will see how the production of cinema is inextricably linked to its distribution. We will discuss the development of radio, film, television, HDTV and the Internet in the context of copyright, pornography, the studio system, multiplex theaters, peer-to-peer Internet technologies and digital personal video recorders.

Changes in distribution necessitate new business models, but they are still by and large unsettled. Apple Computer's success with the iPod and iTunes Music Store will provide us with
at least one successful model for digital distribution. The low costs of Independent filmmaking, the rapid unauthorized copying and distribution of films over DVD and the internet and the increasing costs of traditional marketing and distribution have placed such powerful pressures on the large studios that many in the business say the system is in danger of breaking down completely.

We will read key critical texts alongside films and new media in order to delineate their changing social and cultural functions. As a medium already indelibly marked by technology, cinema's technization through digital technologies alters not only its form and distribution, but its cultural function as well.

In addition to the historical topics, we will also cover the concepts and technology that underlie the new distribution technologies, especially the Internet and so-called "Peer to Peer
technologies." Critical Theory, Post-Fordism, and Post-structural theories of reproduction and information will be addressed. Readings will include texts by Benjamin, Baudrillard, De
Lauretis, William Gibson, Jameson, McLuhan, as well as more recent writings on the technical aesthetic, and political implications of new media. Among the films to be discussed:
Metropolis, Face in the Crowd, A Clockwork Orange, The Conversation, Blade Runner, Videodrome and others.

Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend; the coursework has implications within a wide variety of discourses, including Film, Journalism, Architecture, Comparative Literature, English, Computer Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Law, and Rhetoric.

Required Texts

TBA

This course fulfills the film major upper division auteur requirement. Auteur Theory: Sternberg, Lang, and Preminger

Film 151, Section 1 (4 units)
Instructor: Kaveh Askari

This course examines the Hollywood careers of three German-speaking émigré directors: Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, and Otto Preminger. It attempts to explore the tensions and contradictions of each director within the classical Hollywood system of the 1930s and 1940s. These tensions are evident in aspects of their visual styles as well as in their relation to questions of genre, popular glamour, and modernity. In addition to close analysis of the films the course will consider studio publicity material, fan press, and censorship discourse in order to historically contextualize each director's auteur status.

Required Texts

This course fulfills the film major upper division auteur requirement. Auteur Theory: Ozu and Oshima

Film 151, Section 2 (4 units)
Instructor: Miryam Sas

The Japanese directors Oshima Nagisa and Ozu Yasujiro are two of the most extraordinary and original directors of Japanese cinema. Their work was instrumental in constructing the notions of Japanese cinema that prevail today. Ozu's tightly crafted family melodramas provide an important avenue
of exploration of the cultural politics of Japan. Oshima's early films, reacting against the humanism of Kurosawa and Ozu, were central to the New Wave of Japanese film in the 1960s-1970s. Politically radical, experimental, and often scandalous, Oshima's films invite a wide variety of critical approaches, from psychoanalytic readings to Marxist critiques. The course will study Ozu's work from the silent comedies of the 30s to
his mature masterpieces of the 50s and 60s, and Oshima's New Wave films as well as his more recent contributions. With these directors, we get two very different pictures of Japanese cinema and of what it meant to be part of (and in Oshima's case, to leave) the studio system. Through the course, we will come to a new view of their films, their times, and the place of
auteur theory in understanding their work.

Required Texts

This course fulfills the film major upper division auteur requirement. Auteur Theory: Cronenberg

Film 151, Section 3 (4 units)
Instructor:

Required Texts

This course can be used for an elective for the film major. National Cinema: Film in India: Reel Nation
Also listed as Theater 121

Film 160 (4 units)
Instructor: Sudipto Chatterjee

This course is a survey of the history of Indian cinema, evaluating its importance in the global context as the world's largest film industry. In doing so, it will also look at the socio-political functions of popular media in a developing country with a population of a billion, where the cinema has functioned as the most participatory form of public discourse. How cinema has played the role of nation-builder - mediator, instigator, educator in myriad forms - working as a unifying factor for a nation with a population rich in cultures and languages, a form of public discourse where the nation is both imagined and produced. The course will also attempt to unravel the aesthetic bases of Indian film - how a "western" form of art is ingested into an indigenous Indian aesthetic sensibility and hybridized into an entity of its own kind. Consequently, the class will look at the various categories of Indian cinema, following both historical as well as thematic trajectories, like political films, art cinema, romances, Indian "westerns," gangster movies, mythological/devotional films, propaganda war movies, documentaries, musicals, etc. Students will see film excerpts in class, read essays, book chapters, and some screenplays, and will see films scheduled outside class meeting times.

Required Texts

Film 180A (4 units)
Instructor: J. Mira Kopell

Prerequisites: 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

Richard Walter, Screenwriting: The Art Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing; The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats, Part I: The Screenplay (CMC Publishing); Syd Field, Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay

Film 180B (4 units)
Instructor: J. Mira Kopell

Prerequisites: 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 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. Participants also write short film scripts and explore alternative story structure. Emphasis on characterization, scene structure, visual story telling, and creating a unified script. Class culminates with reading of scripts.

Required Texts

Linda Segar, Making A Good Script Great; The Complete Guide to Standard Script Formats, Part I: The Screenplay; Linda Aronson, Screenwriting Updated

Film 185 (4 units)
Instructor: Gavriel Moses

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

Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time; Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace; Paul Auster, City Of Glass; Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Assignment; Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dream; Course Reader

Film 197A (2 units)
Instructors: Nancy Goldman

Wednesdays, 10 - 11 am 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.

Film 197B (3 units)
Instructors: Marilyn Fabe

Film 197C (2 units)
Instructors: Kathy Geritz

First Meeting: Friday, 4 - 5pm
Meet in PFA's Small Screening Room at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave.

Prerequisites: Declared art or film majors with at least 60 semester units completed. Professor approval required; enrollment limited.

Experience "behind-the-scenes" at PFA! Interns will learn about film curating through creating a program of works by UCB students to present at PFA the following Spring 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.

.