Film and Media Studies
During the 21st century, as our national and global cultures become increasingly dominated by the visual in ubiquitous modes of technology-based communication, the need to become critical viewers — knowledgeable in the history of the most popular art forms of our time and possessing the analytical skills to understand and interpret mass media — is acute.
To address this need, the major in Film and Media Studies requires the rigorous study of history and aesthetics so that students come to understand the creative force of moving image texts, whether digital, electronic or filmic. Courses examine the place of these texts in culture and how their production of meaning relates to industrial and business practices as well as to other artistic endeavors. By complementing the critical studies undergraduate curriculum in Film and Media Studies, courses in production and screenwriting provide — through acts of creation and collaboration — an understanding of the aesthetic and ethical choices that artists confront when working with moving image-based media. Such practical experience integrates theoretical and historical awareness to further enhance students' understanding of the ways in which visual culture makes meaning with established and emergent technologies in contemporary society. This major will benefit any student interested in gaining an intellectual perspective on the relationship between art and technology, culture and industry, and history and theory. This major trains students in rigorous analytical thinking and provides them with research skills and historical knowledge that will assist them in becoming effective participants in the mediated culture of the 21st century.
The program of Film and Media Studies' academic mission is focused on the intellectual and professional development of students, but our faculty regard educating the larger Washington University and St. Louis communities about our field of study to be another important element of our work. To that end, we are committed to sponsoring events — including film festivals, academic lectures and symposia — that further the discussion of and intellectual engagement with all forms of moving image media.
Contact Info
Contact: | Pat Henry |
Phone: | 314-935-4056 |
Email: | fms@wustl.edu |
Website: | https://fms.wustl.edu/ |
Director
Ian Bogost
Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
Endowed Professor
Gaylyn Studlar
David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities
PhD, University of Southern California
Associate Professors
Colin Burnett
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Diane Wei Lewis
PhD, University of Chicago
Assistant Professors
Jianqing Chen
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Reem Hilu
PhD, Northwestern University
Raven Maragh-Lloyd
PhD, University of Iowa
John Powers
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Senior Lecturers
Emeritus Professor
William Paul
PhD, Columbia University
The Major in Film and Media Studies
Total units required: 30
Required courses:
Code | Title | Units |
---|---|---|
Film 220 | Introduction to Film Studies | 3 |
Film 225 | Making Movies | 3 |
or Film 352 | Introduction to Screenwriting | |
Film 330 | History of American Cinema | 3 |
Film 340 | History of World Cinema | 3 |
Film 350 | History of Electronic Media | 3 |
Film 420 | Film Theory | 3 |
Total Units | 18 |
Elective courses:
In addition to these required courses, students must take 12 credits in advanced electives (300 level or higher). All students must take one 3-credit elective that focuses on a national cinema other than that of the United States. In addition, all students must take one 3-credit critical studies elective at the 400 level or above. A 400-level elective in a national cinema may satisfy both of these elective requirements, but a total of 12 units in electives is still required. Electives in critical studies may be drawn from courses on individual directors, specific genres, limited historical periods, individual crafts (e.g., acting) and so on. Students with an interest in production may count two production and/or screenwriting courses toward the major within these 12 elective units.
Concentration in Film and Media Production
Total units required: 36
The concentration in film and media production provides majors in Film and Media Studies with the opportunity to enhance their skills in and knowledge of various forms of moving image media creative production. A student concentrator in film and media production must complete both Film 225 Making Movies and Film 352 Introduction to Screenwriting as core production classes, thus requiring 21 credit units in the concentration's required core. The student must also complete 15 credit units of electives consisting of the following:
- One 3-credit critical studies course in a national or regional (non-U.S.) cinema at the 300 or 400 level (required of all majors)
- One 3-credit critical studies course at the 400 level (screenwriting or production does not count toward this requirement)
- 9 units total credit or three 3-credit electives in digital or film production or screenwriting (3 credits may be for courses at the 200 level or above; 6 credits must be for courses at the 300 level or above)
Courses taken in overseas study are eligible to be used to satisfy the above C category for up to a total of 6 credit units with permission of the Film and Media Studies overseas advisor. Courses offered by another academic department or school at Washington University may be accepted in the above C category for up to 6 credit units with the prior permission of the student's Film and Media Studies advisor. A minimum of C- must be earned for any course to count toward the 36 credit units required for the film and media production concentration.
Additional Information
Senior Honors (Film 499) is intended for majors pursuing honors in Film and Media Studies. In order to enroll for this course, students must apply in advance for honors, possess a minimum cumulative grade point average of 3.65, and be approved by a faculty committee.
The Minor in Film and Media Studies
Total units required: 15
Required courses:
Code | Title | Units |
---|---|---|
Film 220 | Introduction to Film Studies | 3 |
Film 330 | History of American Cinema | 3 |
Film 340 | History of World Cinema | 3 |
Film 350 | History of Electronic Media | 3 |
Total Units | 12 |
Elective courses:
In addition to the required courses, students must also take a 3-credit advanced elective course (300 level or above) to complete the minor.
The Minor in Global Film and Media Studies
Total units required: 15
Required courses:
Code | Title | Units |
---|---|---|
Film 220 | Introduction to Film Studies (offered every fall) | 3 |
Film 340 | History of World Cinema (offered every fall) | 3 |
Total Units | 6 |
Elective courses:
- Two courses (3 credits each) at the 300 or 400 level dealing with national or regional cinemas, such as the following:
Course List Code Title Units Film 320 British Cinema: A History 3 Film 3211 Contemporary Chinese Popular Culture 3 Film 323 The Cinema of Eastern Europe in the Cold War Era 3 Film 325 French Film Culture 3 Film 328 History of German Cinema 3 Film 329 Italian Neorealism 3 Film 349 Media Cultures 3 Film 376 French New Wave 3 Film 4300 Topics in Chinese Media Culture: Charting Identity in the Digital Age 3 Film 431 Renegades and Radicals: The Japanese New Wave 3 Film 443 Memory, Tears and Longing: East Asian Melodrama Film 3 Film 444 Topics in Chinese Language Cinema 3 Film 479 (In)Visible Media: Connection and Crisis in Contemporary Japan 3 - One course (3 credits) at the 300 level or higher that analyzes film or moving image media from different countries or parts of the world. Options in this category include the following:
Course List Code Title Units Film 319 Documentary Film and Media 3 Film 341 Transnational Cinema(s): Film Flows in a Changing World 3 Film 342 Introduction to Video Game Studies 3 Film 366 Women and Film 3 Film 368 Contemporary Women Directors 3 Film 371 Making War 3 Film 419 Theories of Mass Media 3 Film 423 Histories of Media Convergence 3 Film 432 Global Art Cinema 3 Film 443 Memory, Tears and Longing: East Asian Melodrama Film 3 Film 465 Theory and Practice of Experimental Film 3 Film 475 Screening the Holocaust 3 Film 478 Topics in Transmedia Franchises 3 Film 485 Visualizing Orientalism: Art, Cinema and the Imaginary East 1850-2000 3 Film 507 The 007 Saga: James Bond and The Modern Media Franchise 3
Note: With the permission of the director of undergraduate studies, one course (3 credits) on media/film taken in another department or program at the 300 or 400 level may count toward the global media studies minor. Students should consult with their Film and Media Studies advisor or the Film and Media Studies director of undergraduate studies before enrolling in a course offered outside of the program that they hope to count toward this minor.
Additional Information
Elective courses change every academic year, so please visit the Program in Film and Media Studies website for current course listings.
Internships and independent study do not count toward any Film and Media Studies minor.
Visit online course listings to view semester offerings for L53 Film.
L53 Film 110 First-Year Seminar: Science Fiction Literature & Film: A Contrast in Hyper-imaginative Media
This course presents a historical overview of the forms that racial and ethnic representations have taken in American television. The course attempts to chart changes in public perception of racial and ethnic difference in the context of sweeping cultural and social transformations. The course examines notions of medium and ponders the implications for these identities of the contemporary practice of "narrowcasting." Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 112 First-Year Seminar: Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema
From the early documentary roots of cinema through the Civil Rights movement and to the recent democratization of the means of media production, questions of race and ethnicity have proved crucial both to the content of American films and also to the perspective from which they are made. This class looks at the representation of historical moments from the Civil War to Hurricane Katrina, the production of cinematic stereotypes as well as their appropriation for subversive purposes, and the gradual evolution of multiculturalism as a central factor in the stories told and the telling of stories on the American screen. Students use film texts to develop a critical understanding of one of the most important issues in American history. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 114 First-Year Seminar: Superhero Media
This course will examine the superhero as American myth and media industry commodity. We will consider historical, cultural, and industrial aspects of the superhero genre across comic books, films, television series, and video games. Focusing on multiple media allows us to examine an array of medium-specific and cross-media issues (e.g., how criticism of superhero films as "not cinema" reflects a legacy of comics being perceived as juvenile). Our study will encompass a number of critical frameworks, including myth, adaptation, gender, race, and transmedia storytelling. Each course unit will focus on how different media have presented one or more superhero franchises (e.g., Superman, Batman, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Watchmen). Required screenings. Enrollment limited to first-year students.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 115 First-Year Seminar:
This course explores the complex relationship between moving images and ideas of the real in both movies and television. It explores theories of representation, surveillance, authenticity, truth and realism in this context. From the earliest "actuality" films to the recent phenomenon of reality television programming, it asks if screen images capture what is "really" happening in front of the camera or if conventions of representation, genre and narrative mediate the reality of these images. More significantly, it inquires into why such questions matter. At issue is the role that moving images on both the big and the small screen have in our understanding of the world as it is and ourselves as we experience it.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: SSC BU: HUM EN: S
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L53 Film 116 First-Year Seminar: Cult TV: Critical Approaches to Fans and Fictions
What do such disparate television series as Dr. Who, Star Trek, The Avengers, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and Sealab 2021 have in common? They all attract loyal audiences, stimulate "subcultural" sensibilities, lend themselves to "textual poaching," and thus qualify as examples of "Cult TV," a term that has become increasingly salient within critical studies of the medium. In this course we explore the subject of cult television from a variety of social, cultural and thematic perspectives, so that by the end of the semester students have gained a deeper understanding of its historical importance as a barometer of both popular and oppositional tastes. We examine how these and other examples of genre-based network and cable programming complicate distinctions between lowbrow and highbrow tastes while sustaining worldwide "interpretative communities" years after their original air dates. Students also examine the importance of syndication, home video technologies, ancillary markets, publishing and the internet in the construction of fan cultures. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 117 First-Year Seminar: Asians in American Film
This course surveys the history of Asian representations in American cinema from the silent period to the contemporary era. Throughout the semester we focus on images of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese that have become most ingrained in American popular culture over the past century, from Fu Manchu and Madame Butterfly stereotypes popular during the classical studio era to more recent reconfigurations of racialized imagery in Jackie Chan and Jet Li films. We also examine selected works by Asian-American independent writer-directors; films and videos such as Chan is Missing, History and Memory, and Better Luck Tomorrow that challenge the stereotypes and normative tropes of "Orientalism" still permeating mainstream media. Students are asked to frame textual analyses of key films (such as The Cheat, Daughter of Shanghai, Battle Hymn, Flower Drum Song, and Enter the Dragon) within various political, social, cultural and industrial contexts (e.g., anti-Asiatic immigration and labor policies; U.S. foreign policies; the practice of "yellowface"; censorship codes; wars in East and Southeast Asia; anti-miscegenation laws; grassroots campaigns to stem the tide of stereotypes and hate-crimes; etc.).
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 118 First-Year Seminar: Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: James Bond in Film, Literature and Popular Culture
Originally a character in Cold War spy literature, James Bond has emerged as an international pop culture phenomenon. In this course, we explore the evolution of James Bond from Ian Fleming to the "spy" parodies in international cinema. We read several of Fleming's novels and short stories, including Casino Royale (1953), Octopussy (1966) and The Property of a Lady (1967), and discuss these texts in light of post-war spy literature. We screen numerous Bond films, and compare and contrast James Bond the literary and cinematic character, how Bond emerged as a franchise hero through the vision of producers Harry Saltzman and Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, and critical aspects of the film franchise, including its storytelling roots in Hollywood serials, its use of gadgets and special effects, and the role of stardom in their marketing (Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Roger Moore, Madonna, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig). Finally, we explore the re-envisioning of Bond in various media and art forms in global popular culture, including music, DC and Marvel Comics, games, children's television and in Asian cinema (Stephen Chow's 1994 From Beijing with Love). Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 119 First-Year Seminar: Anime as Popular Culture
In the contemporary media landscape, film, television, games, publishing, and merchandizing are increasingly connected and help distribute cultural products across the globe. Japanese animation is one of the earliest and most successful examples of this powerful strategy. This course examines the global franchising industry of Japanese anime to explore basic questions about media and popular culture: How do we define a medium? How do consumer practices shape media and popular culture? What is the impact of globalization on media, and global media on national culture? Our investigations of Japan "cool" and its avid consumer cultures cover: animation aesthetics and technology; media convergence; anime fan cultures; science-fiction and remaking the body, history, and identity through global media. No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 15 college freshmen. In addition to class meetings, there is a mandatory weekly scheduled screening.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 120 First-Year Seminar: Horror Across Media
In spite of -- and because of -- its propensity for terrifying readers and viewers, horror has proven to be one of the most resilient and popular genres across all forms of media. Why are audiences attracted to a genre that causes fear, revulsion, and distress? This course will consider the cultural, philosophical, and generic dimensions of horror and explore how it operates across an array of media platforms: film, literature, television, comics, and video games. We will read two literary masters of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and we will screen some of the most successful horror films of the last 50 years. We will also study horror through a variety of critical frameworks, including gender, stardom, special effects, transnationality, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, and interactivity. The course will culminate in two extended case studies. In the first, we will compare and contrast literary, filmic, and televisual adaptations of "The Shining." In the second, we will consider "The Walking Dead" as a franchise that spreads its narrative across comics, multiple television programs, and video games. Required screenings. Enrollment limited to first-year students.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 121 First-Year Seminar: Youth Culture and Visual Media
Since the advent of cinema through the recent development of online social networking, visual media in the United States and around the world have been identified with a market of youthful consumers and producers. This course looks at the development of youth culture in the United States and its unique relationship to visual media, including film, television, comic books, video games and the internet, in the 20th and 21st centuries. We examine youth culture as a social phenomenon generated by the young, a means of representing the experience of being youthful, and as part of the ongoing debates over the effects of media on the young. As alternately mass culture, popular culture, counter culture and participatory culture, youth culture holds a privileged place in the history of American visual media and continues to influence production and innovation within the media marketplace.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 200 Special Projects
This course is intended for freshmen and sophomores who wish to register for internships. Students must receive program approval prior to beginning the internship. Please consult the program guidelines governing internships.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L53 Film 220 Introduction to Film Studies
How do film images create meaning? What are the tools the film artist uses to create images? This course introduces students to basic techniques of film production and formal methodologies for analyzing film art. Students learn the essential components of film language — staging, camera placement, camera movement, editing, lighting, special effects, film stock, lenses — to heighten perceptual skills in viewing films and increase critical understanding of the ways films function as visual discourse. The course is foundational for the major in film and media studies. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 225 Making Movies
This course introduces the core concepts and skills for producing dramatic narrative film and video, building on the Hollywood paradigm. No previous technical experience is required, but students should have taken or be concurrently enrolled in Film 220. This course teaches students how films are put together to tell stories, negotiating between the possibilities of cinematic language and the practicalities of working with machines and other people. In order to develop an understanding of filmic narration, students learn the basics of camera operation, lighting, digital video editing, sound design and recording, casting and directing actors, visual composition and art direction, and production planning and organization. These concepts are put into practice through a series of exercises culminating in a creative, narrative short digital video. This course fulfills the prerequisite for 300- and 400-level video and film production courses in Film and Media Studies and the production requirement in the FMS major. Admission by wait-list only. Prerequisite: Film 220.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 305 Music and Masculinity in the Movies of Martin Scorsese
This course considers the work of American filmmaker Martin Scorsese, with close attention to (1) how Scorsese uses music (and sound) to construct intense cinematic worlds and (2) how his film characters and plots represent various sorts of white American men. The consistent collision between Scorsese's interest in music as a driver of film style and content and his penchant for male-centered, frequently violent narratives makes him an ideal central figure for our study of white American masculinities at the movies over the last five decades. Films to be studied include Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 310 Video Production
An advanced course exploring the creative and technical aspects of video production. Students sharpen their knowledge of cameras, directing, lighting, sound recording, nonlinear systems and narrative structures. In addition to acquiring a theoretical understanding of the production process, students gain practical experience by producing, outside of class time, a short project reflecting their visual and conceptual maturity. Prerequisite: Film 230 Moving Images and Sound or permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 311 Documentary Production
In parallel with an overview of various documentary genres, ranging from the personal, the poetic, the agitprop and cinema verité, this course offers students the opportunity to produce a short documentary piece on the topic of their choosing. Aesthetic and ethical issues are explored by considering the overall methodology in terms of subjectivity, content, structure and the possible usage of music and/or voice-over. For the sake of completing the project in time, it is recommended that students be familiar with the subject matter of their investigation before taking the course. Prerequisite: Film 230 Moving Images and Sound or permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 319 Documentary Film and Media
From movie screens to cell phones, moving images that "document" life have never been more ubiquitous. What do these images tell us about the relationship between representation and reality? How have film and media makers used moving images to represent major cultural, political, and social upheavals as well as communicated an understanding of everyday life? To answer these questions, this course will survey the rich, vibrant legacy of documentary filmmaking as well as demonstrate its ongoing artistic and cultural relevance to newer media. We will examine key modes of documentary film while contextualizing the historical development of these forms within aesthetic, industrial, and political factors. We will also consider ethical issues in filmic representation, especially in relation to the ethnographic tradition. In addition to studying the work of documentary pioneers, we will explore contemporary activist documentaries, as well as new industrial developments such as the serialized online documentary. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 320 British Cinema: A History
British cinema has gotten a bad rap. French film director François Truffaut once declared that cinema and Britain were incompatible terms since "the English countryside, the subdued way of life, the stolid routine-are anti-dramatic. . . [even] the weather itself is anti-cinematic." Yet British films proudly rank among some of the most acclaimed and beloved in film history: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, A Hard Day's Night, Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, Zulu, The Ladykillers, A Night to Remember, Trainspotting, The King's Speech, and the James Bond franchise. Admittedly, British cinema has had its ups and downs, never quite knowing whether to position itself as a distinctive national cinema or as a rival to Hollywood. This uncertainty has fostered a rich diversity and complexity that this course will emphasize in a survey approach. We will give equal attention to the work of high-profile directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell and to important "genres" in which the British seem to excel — like black comedy, imperialist adventure, "kitchen sink" drama, documentary, and the so-called "heritage" films that paved the way for television's Downton Abbey. Required Screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 3211 Contemporary Chinese Popular Culture
With the rise of the Chinese economy and global capitalism, popular culture has proliferated in mainland China in recent years. This course traces the development of Chinese popular and youth culture and society from the 1990s to the present. It also refers back to modern times and ancient Chinese Confucian philosophy for historical background information. The course covers various forms of Chinese popular culture, such as movies, music, television programs, Internet literature, religion, sports, and food. Students observe primary resources and read academic articles to engage in a multiperspective and multimedia view of present-day China in the age of globalization and East Asian regionalization.
Same as L04 Chinese 3211
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 322 Contemporary East Asian Cinema
This course focuses on films made in Japan, Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea over the past three decades. Students examine how the global/local geopolitics specific to the post-Cold War period, the passing of authoritarian regimes, the boom and bust of the Asian economy, and international film festivals have influenced the shaping of New East Asian cinemas across borders. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 323 The Cinema of Eastern Europe in the Cold War Era
This course has two objectives. On the one hand, we watch masterpieces of European cinema, awarded at international festivals and directed by legendary names such as Milos Forman, Emir Kusturica and Andrzej Wajda, and focus on their artistic genius. On the other hand, we study the way in which the confrontational politics of the Cold War inform these films, with a special focus on the perplexing predicament of a divided and antagonized Europe. The readings for this class emphasize our dual exploration. We work with texts dealing with both film history and its aesthetics and with broader analyses of the intellectual and political landscape of the Cold War context. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 324 History of Chinese Cinemas: 1930s-1990s
This course offers an overview of Chinese cinemas, including those of Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, over the 20th century. We study major trends such as the left-wing filmmaking in the 1930s, the Maoist revolutionary narratives, Taiwanese healthy realism, the New Cinemas of the three regions, and contemporary transnational productions. Major topics include urban modernity, gender formation, national and transnational cinemas within specific historical contexts. All films come with English subtitles. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 325 French Film Culture
Called "the seventh art," film has a long tradition of serious popular appreciation and academic study in France. This course offers an overview of French cinema, including the origins of film (Lumière brothers, Méliès), the inventive silent period (which created such avant-garde classics as Un chien andalou), the poetic realism of the '30s, the difficulties of the war years, the post-war emphasis on historical/nationalist themes in the "tradition of quality" films, the French New Wave's attempt to create a more "cinematic" style, the effects of the political turmoil of May '68 on film culture, the "art house" reception of French films in the United States, and the broader appeal of recent hypervisual ("cinéma du look") films, such as La Femme Nikita and Amélie. While the primary focus of the course is on French cinema, we also discuss the reciprocal influences between American and French film culture, both in terms of formal influences on filmmaking and theoretical approaches to film studies. French film terms are introduced but no prior knowledge of the language is expected. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 326 Samurai, Rebels and Bandits: The Japanese Period Film
Tales of heroism, crime, revolt and political intrigue. Bloody battles, betrayal, madness and flashing swords. This is the world of jidaigeki eiga, the Japanese period film. In this course, we analyze the complex (and often flamboyant) narrative, visual and thematic structures of films about the age of the samurai. We discuss jidaigeki representations of violence and masculinity, self-sacrifice and rebellion, and the invention of tradition as well as critical uses of history. In addition to the historical content of the films, we study the historical contexts that shaped jidaigeki film production and discuss relevant transformations in Japanese cinema and society. Period films have been shaped by and exert strong influences on Japanese theater, oral storytelling, popular literature, comics, and international film culture, all of which are helpful for understanding the films. As we track changes in jidaigeki style and subject matter, the course introduces theories for interpreting narrative structure, genre repetition and innovation, intertextuality, and representations of "the past." All readings are in English. No knowledge of Japanese required. No prerequisites. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 328 History of German Cinema
This course explores the major developments of German cinema throughout the 20th century. More specifically, this course engages with issues relating to German film culture's negotiation of popular filmmaking and art cinema, of Hollywood conventions and European avant-garde sensibilities. Topics include the political functions of German film during the Weimar, the Nazi, the postwar, and the postwall eras; the influence of American mass culture on German film; the role of German émigrés in the classical Hollywood studio system; and the place of German cinema in present-day Europe and in our contemporary age of globalization. Special attention is given to the role of German cinema in building and questioning national identity, to the ways in which German feature films over the past hundred years have used or challenged mainstream conventions to recall the national past and envision alternative futures. Films by directors such as Murnau, Lang, Fassbinder, Herzog, Tykwer and many others. All readings and discussions in English. May not be taken for German major or minor credit. Required screenings.
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L53 Film 329 Italian Neorealism
This course explores the visual language of one of the most influential film movements of the 20th century. We concentrate on the origins of neorealism in Italian post-war cinema and history, and focus on the works of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. We also consider the longer-term influence of the movement both in Italy and elsewhere. Throughout this course, we reflect on the possibilities of mimesis in cinema, on the social and political engagement of neorealist film, and on the factors that caused its decline.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 330 History of American Cinema
This course traces the history of the American cinema from the earliest screenings in vaudeville theaters through the birth of the feature film to movies in the age of video. The course examines both the contributions of individual filmmakers as well as the determining contexts of modes of production, distribution and exhibition. The course aims to provide an understanding of the continuing evolution of the American cinema, in its internal development, in its incorporation of new technologies, and in its responses to other national cinemas. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 331 The New Hollywood Cinema
This course examines the history of film culture and the film industry in the United States since the end of the classical Hollywood studio system. It pays special attention to the period of auteur-centered filmmaking in the 1970s. During this time, the end of the production code, the financial crisis of the industry, the unparalleled influence of European New Wave and Art films, and the introduction of the first generation of film school graduates (the so-called "movie brats") all combined amidst the tumultuous cultural politics of such movements as the counterculture, civil rights and second-wave feminism to form a film-historical moment often called the Hollywood Renaissance. This brief period was soon followed by a newly reinvigorated Hollywood industry focused on the high-concept blockbuster. Such rapid transformations in the practice and nature of American film not only continue to influence commercial filmmaking today but also continue to shape our understanding of the role of authorship, genre and ideology within Hollywood. The course consider films of the New Hollywood in the context of tensions between radicalism and populism, progressivism and nihilism, entertainment and ideology, artistic and commercial success. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 333 Making Movies II: Intermediate Narrative Filmmaking
In Making Movies II, students advance their skills in filmmaking through a series of exercises and individual short films culminating in a final narrative project shot in high definition digital video and edited in Adobe CC and Premiere Pro. With faculty guidance, and working in groups, students collaborate in producing a narrative film that is a minimum of 10 minutes in length, following three-act structure and involving elements of motivation, conflict, and resolution. In addition to this structured approach to content, students are encouraged to achieve a unified aesthetic approach to picture and soundtrack that reinforces/enhances the meaning of their final projects. The course develops student skills through lectures, demonstrations, in-class screening of excerpts and critiques. Topics covered include idea development, preproduction planning, directing actors, composition, lighting, and editing. Students are required to assist other students in their productions and attend all classes. 3 credits. Admission by waitlist only. Prerequisites: Film 220 and Film 225 or Film 230.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 336 Cinema and Ireland
Like many other Anglophone and Francophone countries, Ireland only even started to develop a robust national cinema in the 1970s. As in, for instance, Australia and New Zealand, growth had previously been blocked by the dominance of local screens by films from, on the one hand, the overbearing "imperial" power, Britain, and, on the other, Hollywood, center of an even stronger cultural imperialism. Increased national self-assertion coincided with the weakening of the grip of those two cinemas in the post-classical period. A major focus of the class is on some of the key works of the filmmakers who established themselves in the 1980s, notably Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan. But, as the title indicates — not simply Irish Cinema — it deals with more than this. Like Ireland itself, Irish cinema is deeply marked by, and preoccupied with, the political and cultural struggles of the past, and recent cinema is illuminated by seeing it in the context of earlier films: Hollywood and British versions of Ireland, whether shot on location or in the studio, as well as the isolated earlier landmarks of an indigenous Irish cinema. We also look at the rich topic of the representation of Irish immigrants in Hollywood films. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 337 Retro Game Design
Before they became "retro," games played on platforms of the 1970s and 1980s were just games. But early game-console hardware was designed with very particular ideas of what made a game a game, and under extreme constraints of cost and technical viability. Creators designed for these constraints, and their work then influenced the design of later hardware and software. This is a course about the history, design, and technology of one retro game console, the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (also known as the Atari VCS or the Atari 2600). The first popular home console, the Atari VCS is a truly weird computer: It "boasts" 128 bytes of RAM, no video buffer, and a custom graphics and sound chip designed to interface with then-universal cathode ray tube televisions. Against all odds, creators made fun and successful games within these extreme constraints. Just as an artist benefits from learning the fundamentals of their craft, so a game designer or developer can benefit from returning to these early and crude hardware platforms. In this course, students will learn the technical and creative history of the Atari, and they will also learn the fundamentals of programming its unfamiliar hardware. Students will carry out programming exercises, mostly in the assembly language instructions required to operate this unusual computer. They will then make their own games for the Atari, which will be able to run on the actual, 45-year-old hardware.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM, VC BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 340 History of World Cinema
The course surveys the history of cinema as it developed in nations other than the United States. Beginning with the initially dominant film-producing nations of Western Europe, this course considers the development of various national cinemas in Europe, Asia and Third World countries. The course seeks to develop an understanding of each individual film both as an expression of a national culture as well as a possible response to international movements in other art forms. Throughout, the course considers how various national cinemas sought ways of dealing with the pervasiveness of Hollywood films, developing their own distinctive styles, which could in turn influence American cinema itself. Priority given to majors. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 341 Transnational Cinema(s): Film Flows in a Changing World
Across a century of extreme nationalism, Cold War imperialism and increased globalization, moving image culture remains deeply tied to the evolution of global economics, shifting notions of local identity, and human migration. Recent changes in the dynamic of international economics and cultural flow have led to new critical approaches that reassess international cinema as being constructed by relationships that transcend national borders. This course examines multiple ways in which cinema works "transnationally," focusing on recent theories of modernism, globalization and borderless cultures. Exploring a range of contexts from American domination of the early international market, to the recent evolution of Chinese blockbuster action films, to contemporary Palestinian video art, this course looks at the way in which material developments, narrative and aesthetic conventions, and film professionals have circulated over the past century. We also look at how new technologies of production, distribution and exhibition challenge traditional notions of cultural borders. Required screenings and in-class textual analysis are used to complement industrial studies of how transnational flows have come to define contemporary audiovisual media practices. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 342 Introduction to Video Game Studies
This course will introduce students to multiple facets of video games as an art form, as a business, and as a part of American popular culture. The course will begin with a broad establishment of game studies and an investigation of the uniqueness of video games as a medium. Subsequent weeks will introduce different approaches to studying video games — including historical, industrial, technological, cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic — drawn from a variety of sources. Weekly lab sections will provide the opportunity for screenings — including documentaries, news reports, television episodes, web series, and feature films — and video game play. Students will complete a final research project on a video game of their choice and present on their projects in class. Required lab.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM, VC BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 344 Children's Television
How does contemporary television imagine children? How does the industry speak to them, with what aims, and using what types of representational strategies and modes of address? In turn, how do young people respond, both as viewers and, with the advent and increasing accessibility of new technologies, as media producers? This seminar will address these and other related questions while introducing students to the study of children's television in cultural and critical media studies. Throughout, we will address the theoretical question suggested by the course's title, a reference to the work of literary scholar Jacqueline Rose: Is children's television possible?
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 345 Sexual Politics in Film Noir and Hard-Boiled Literature
Emerging in American films most forcefully during the 1940s, film noir is a cycle of films associated with a distinctive visual style and a cynical worldview. In this course, we explore the sexual politics of film noir as a distinctive vision of American sexual relations every bit as identifiable as the form's stylized lighting and circuitous storytelling. We explore how and why sexual paranoia and perversion seem to animate this genre and why these movies continue to influence "neo-noir" filmmaking into the 21st century, even as film noir's representation of gender and sexuality is inseparable from its literary antecedents, most notably, the so-called "hard-boiled" school of writing. We read examples from this literature by Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich, and discuss these novels and short stories in the context of other artistic and cultural influences on gendered power relations and film noir. We also explore the relationship of these films to censorship and to changing post-World War II cultural values. Films screened in complete prints or in excerpts likely include many of the following: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet, Phantom Lady, Strangers on a Train, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The High Wall, Sudden Fear, The Big Combo, Laura, The Glass Key, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, The Crimson Kimono, Touch of Evil, Alphaville, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Bad Lieutenant and Memento. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 346 From Golden Age to Wasteland: U.S. Television in the 1950s and 1960s
How did television become the dominant news and entertainment medium of the second half of the 20th century? How did the medium come to define itself and American identities in the post-WW II era? In an era where various social movements began to lay claim to the cultural center, why did "mad men" eventually give way to magical women and fantastic families? This course examines the cultural, industrial and aesthetic changes in U.S. television broadcasting during a time that was crucial to defining its relationship to the public as well as to Hollywood, the government, critics and American commerce. The class explores the relationships and shifts that made television the U.S.'s most popular consensus medium but one that also would profit by the expression of alternative tastes, politics and identities. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 349 Media Cultures
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of cultural and media studies. Through a focus on television and new media, it analyzes current theoretical ideas and debates about culture. Main topics include the relationship between new technologies and everyday life and popular culture; analysis of media messages and images; how media help construct new identities and mark differences between groups; analysis of the globalization of the production and circulation of media culture; the rise of multimedia cultural industries; and the role of the audience. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM, VC BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 350 History of Electronic Media
This course traces the history of electronic media as they have become the dominant source for entertainment and information in contemporary culture, starting with over-the-air broadcasting of radio and television through to cable and the "narrowcasting" achieved by digital technologies. While some attention is paid to other national industries, the chief focus of the course is on electronic media in the United States to determine, in part, the transformative role they have played in the cultural life of the nation. The course explores the relationship of the electronic media industries to the American film industry, determining how their interactions with the film industry helped mutually shape the productions of both film and electronic media. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 352 Introduction to Screenwriting
Writers explore the various elements, structures and styles used in crafting a motion picture screenplay. They experience this process as they conceive, develop and execute the first act of a feature-length script. Writers create a screenplay story, present an outline for class discussion and analysis, then craft Act One. Writers are encouraged to consult with the instructor at various stages: concept, outline, character and scene development, and dialogue execution. While the students fashion their screenwriting independently, the class also explores the general elements of theme, genre and voice. A more specific examination of mechanics, the nuts-and-bolts of story construction, plotting, pacing, etc. follows to support the ongoing writing process. In-class exercises aid the writer in sharpening skills and discovering new approaches to form and content. Writers' work is shared and discussed regularly in class. Screening of film scenes and sequences provides students with concrete examples of how dramatic screenwriting evolves once it leaves the writer's hands.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 353 Writing Episodic Television
This class focuses on all the factors that go into preparing and writing an episode for a network TV series (dramas only). Students begin with a "pitch" (verbally or in short outline form) for an idea for a show currently on a network schedule. Once the "pitch" is accepted, the student then completes a "beat sheet," and ultimately a spec script that can run from 62 to 75 pages. Two drafts of the script are required. During the course of this process, students also learn how to research their narrative premises by contacting legal, medical and law enforcement experts in order to guarantee the accuracy of their scripts. In addition to learning the actual writing process, students are expected to watch several television shows and to read books, scripts and industry trade papers as they pertain to the craft and business of television writing. Finally, students also meet agents, producers, directors and other television industry professionals in order to gain their insights into the scriptwriting process and to gain a more global view of the steps involved in bringing their ideas to the screen.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 356 Television Culture and Cult TV: Critical Approaches to Fandom
Why do television series inspire passionate involvement on the part of some viewers? What are the differences among being a viewer, an audience member, and a fan? How can we make scholarly sense of cultural practices such as learning to speak Klingon or building a "repli-car" of the General Lee? Studies of fandom have attempted to answer such questions and continue to explore issues that are crucial to understanding contemporary television culture. The phenomenon of "Cult TV" offers fertile ground for examining the complex dynamics at play among fans, popular culture, the institutions of American media, and individual programs. In its exploration of cult television and fans, this course engages with key issues in contemporary media such as the proliferation of new media technologies and the repurposing of existing media forms, the permeable boundaries between high and low or mass and oppositional culture, and the fragmentation and concentration of media markets. The class combines close textual analysis with studies of fan practices to examine a variety of television programs, from canonical cult texts such as Star Trek and Doctor Who to "quality" fan favorites such as Designing Women and Cagney & Lacey to contemporary cult/quality hybrids such as Lost and Heroes. In mapping out this cultural territory, we develop a set of critical perspectives on audience identities and activities and examine the continuing and conflicted imagination of fans by media producers, distributors, regulators and critics. Required screenings. Prerequisite: Film 220 or Film 350, or consent of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 357 Quality Television and the "Primetime Novel"
Over the past four decades, the cultural status of television in the United States has been reconfigured and complicated with changes in industrial structures, audience formations, regulatory presumptions and production techniques and strategies. This course examines these interrelated forces, particularly as they have fostered a set of programs and practices often hailed as "Quality Television." The class surveys the institutional paradigms that gave rise to particular generations of programming celebrated as "quality" and analyze the systems of distinction and cultural value that make the label socially and industrially salient. We critically investigate the role of audiences and the conceptions of viewer choice at play in these developments. In addition, the course analyzes the textual features that have come to signify narrative complexity and aesthetic sophistication. We examine foundational historical examples of this phenomenon from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey to Northern Exposure as well as more contemporary broadcast and cable fiction such as Lost, The Wire and Mad Men. In addition, students are expected to watch a complete series, chosen in consultation with the instructor, as part of their final research project. Required screenings. Prerequisite: Film 220 or Film 350, or consent of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L53 Film 358 Combat Movie Music and Sound after Vietnam
This course considers the Hollywood combat movie genre after the Vietnam War (post 1975) by listening closely to how these always noisy films use music and sound effects to tell stories of American manhood and militarism. Centering on an elite group of prestige films — action movies with a message for adult audiences — the course examines 35 years of Hollywood representations of World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and post-9/11 wars against terrorism. Close analysis of how combat film directors and composers have used music and sound in conjunction with the cinematic image are set within a larger context of ancillary texts (source materials, soundtrack recordings, published and unpublished scripts), media folios ( press kits, reviews, editorials, newspaper and magazine stories and interviews), and scholarly writing from across the disciplines. Films screened include Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Courage Under Fire, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, We Were Soldiers, Flags of our Fathers, The Hurt Locker and Act of Valor, as well as pre-1975 combat films starring John Wayne. The ability to read music is not required. Required screenings. Prerequisite: none.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 359 The American Musical Film
Film musicals were crucial to the success of the American film industry from the dawn of sound film in the late 1920s to the demise of the studio system in the late 1950s. This course examines the American film musical from a variety of aesthetic, critical and historical perspectives, with particular attention to how the genre interacted with popular music and dance and the major political and social trends of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 360 The History of the Film Score
This course looks at the role of music in Hollywood films from the beginning of the sound era to the present. Larger themes include the importance of technology, industry structures shaping the nature of scores, notable film music composers, the relationship between music, gender and genre, music's role in the adaptation of literary texts to film, the power of directors to shape the content of film scores, and the importance of popular music as a driving economic and aesthetic force in film music history. Films screened include From Here to Eternity, Stagecoach, High Noon, The Night of the Hunter, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Born on the Fourth of July, Casino, Jarhead and The Social Network. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 361 Film Sound
Although film critics and theorists tend to think of cinema as a "visual art," this shorthand description of the medium overlooks the importance of film sound in cinematic storytelling. This course is intended to provide a general overview of the way in which film theorists have treated the issue of sound in the cinema. Among the issues addressed in the course are: the contribution sound technology and practice make to film form; the various possible formal relationships between sound and image; the effects of sound technologies on notions of realism and verisimilitude; the importance of sound to particular genres, such as the horror film; and lastly, the role of sound in film spectatorship. The course also showcases the work of the most important sound stylists in film history, such as Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman and David Lynch. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 363 Video Post-Production
While post-production of the soundtrack has been around for years, post-production of the "visual track" has increasingly become a major phase in the video and movie-making process. It often allows filmmakers to enhance existing footage with potentially dazzling results. As in all our production courses, we are concerned with developing strong content. The focus is not on special effects per se, but rather on how they may be used to enhance the message. Students find a nonprofit organization of vital importance in need of exposure and produce a Public Service Announcement to be broadcast. Key post-production software such as Commotion, AfterEffects and Motion are explored throughout the semester. Prerequisite: Film 230 Moving Images and Sound or consent of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 3644 "Look Here, Karen": The Politics of Black Digital Resistance to White Femininity
In this course, we will explore the ways in which Black online publics use resistance strategies, such as mimetic imagery and racial humor, to call attention to white femininity and its deployment of the police against African Americans. We will trace the relationship between the police state and white femininity through the historical lens of 'innocence' and protection of the U.S. nation as well as the similarities and differences of Black online publics' responses in relation to past resistance strategies. What does it mean to be a 'typical' Karen in Internet culture? What are the aesthetic boundaries of Karens? And, what do digital platforms afford to Black users who make Karens visible? While paying attention to race, gender and class, this course offers students the skills to be able to collect and analyze online data, such as 'Karen' memes, in order to make critical arguments and observations that are grounded in historical accuracy.
Same as L90 AFAS 3644
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 366 Women and Film
The aim of this course is primarily to familiarize students with the work of prominent women directors over the course of the 20th century, from commercial blockbusters to the radical avant-garde. Approaching the films in chronological order, we consider the specific historical and cultural context of each filmmaker's work. In addition we discuss the films in relation to specific gender and feminist issues such as the status of women's film genres, representations of men and women on screen, and the gender politics of film production. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 368 Contemporary Women Directors
Despite recent media attention to the gender gap in Hollywood, women still account for less than 10% of all directors, and only five women have ever been nominated for the Best Director Oscar. However, these abysmal statistics do not reflect the reality that female directors are producing some of the most innovative and exciting films of the 21st century. This course is intended to provide a general overview of the remarkable contributions of women directors to contemporary cinema (1990 to present). First, we will turn our attention to women in the commercial industry, examining topics such as female authorship, popular genres, and the gender politics of production cultures in Hollywood. Then, we will survey women directors working outside of the system in documentary, independent, and experimental filmmaking modes. Finally, we will adopt a transnational perspective to investigate the contributions of women directors to world cinema, contextualizing the films of "women cinéastes" from countries such as Hong Kong, Argentina, and Iran in relation to their national cinemas and international film festival networks. In addition, we will discuss the films of women directors in terms of feminist and gender issues and as texts that clarify critical issues in film analysis, interpretation, and criticism. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 370 American Horrors
Horror movies. Fright films. Scream marathons. Blood and gore fests. Why should we want to look at movies that aim to frighten us? What is the attraction of repulsion? Is there an aesthetics of ugliness? Except for some early prestigious literary adaptations such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the horror film began as a low-class genre, a notch above exploitation movies. In the 1970s and 1980s, it became the dominant commercial genre by offering increasingly graphic images of violence and mayhem. The horror film had arrived: lavish budgets, big stars and dazzling special effects in mainstream major studio films competed with low-budget, no frills productions that helped establish artistically ambitious and quirky filmmakers such as George Romero and David Cronenberg. By a chronological survey of the American horror film, this course explores how differing notions of what is terrifying reflect changing cultural values and norms. Throughout, we consider the difficult questions raised by horror's simple aim of scaring its audience. In addition to weekly screenings, work for the course includes analytical and theoretical essays on the horror film. Written analyses of films with a close attention to visual style is required. Prerequisite: Film 220. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 371 Making War
This course examines the cinematic representation of war. Using World War II as a case study, students examine a series of combat pictures, documentaries and "home front" films from the 1940s to the present. Several key questions guide the class discussion: How do war films respond to and shape the political worlds in which they are produced? How do these films confront the aftermath of war and the soldier's homecoming? Where is the line between the home front and the front line? More broadly, what does it mean to portray the violence and suffering that war inevitably brings? At the close of the semester, students partake in an in-class symposium presenting their research on the cinematic treatment of other conflicts, from the Civil War to the “War on Terror.” Films include: The Boat, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Why We Fight and Mrs. Miniver. Readings include works by Susan Sontag, Kaja Silverman and W.G. Sebald. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 376 French New Wave
French cinema from 1958 to 1968 offered La Nouvelle Vague or The New Wave, one of the most innovative, influential and critically discussed movements in film history. The New Wave marked a major turning point in the relationship between film, thought and politics in France, as well as a unique bridge between art cinema and pop culture. Speaking for more than just the youth generation of its own country, it had a major influence on new approaches in subsequent European, American and Asian cinemas. This course offers a detailed look at the social values, artistic motivations and aesthetic experiments embodied in the French New Wave through the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and others, positioning their work within the larger social, political and cultural environment of this period. As many of these directors collaborated as filmmakers and also were active as film critics and theorists, this class provides a unique insight into the overlapping between visual theory and practice, film and other media, culture and society. Weekly screening required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 379 Expressionism in Theater and Film
This course is designed as an advanced introduction to the aesthetic movement of Expressionism as it appeared in Germany and the United States in the media of theater and film. Characterized by stylized settings that "ex-press" the internal spiritual/emotional/psychological state of its central character, Expressionism is usually discussed as a reaction to Realism, given its overt symbolism, telegraphic diction, and episodic action. Beginning with a brief general introduction to the movement (including its manifestation in the visual arts), we will consider its cultural, political, and critical history, while exploring more recent scholarly investigations into the significance of its performance dimensions.
Same as L15 Drama 379
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 3826 Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Market Economy, Social Injustice, New Technologies
This class studies the relationship between cinema and society in Latin America between 1988 and the present. Latin American cinema in this period has gone to a period of deep crisis to the consolidation of industries and production with significant global recognition and impact. In this, cinema has strong correlations with neoliberalism, the political doctrine tied to free-market reform, democratization and privatization, among other ideas. The class will be based on the study and discussion of key films of the period to develop two themes. First, we will study the way in which cinema has become a cultural practice central to the discussion of the effects of neoliberalism in the region, as well as the opposition to neoliberalism. Topics in this regard will include: the social impact of free market reforms, growing economic and social inequality, the emergence of working class, Black and indigenous communities, the rise and fall of the New Left, the creation of new elites and other related themes. Second, we will study the way in which films are made and distributed and the changes on film production over the past decades. Topics will include the privatization of production and exhibition, the role of home video and streaming, the importance of film festivals and the move from national to translational scenes of production. Prereq: L45 165D or L53 220 or other coursework in Latin American Studies, or Film and Media Studies, desirable but not required. Students without this background are encouraged to contact the instructor.
Same as L45 LatAm 3826
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 3900 EALC Seminar: Screening East Asia: From Scroll Painting to Haptic Interface
This course introduces students to East Asian media cultures by focusing on a specific topic - the "screen." Students will explore how screen is not only an architectural construct (the painted screen) or a projection surface, but an electronic display, interface, or game console. Through examining a selection of scroll paintings, films, and digital artworks in Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan, they will learn to be attentive to the material, infrastructural, and formal conditions of how mass media is produced, exhibited, and consumed. Other media objects and phenomena to be discussed include manga and anime, console games, advertising walls, immersive installations, TikTok/Douyin short videos, digital filters and selfies, touch-based interfaces, among others. The class will also scrutinize the employment of the screen as motifs and metaphors in East Asian visual cultures and discuss how these metaphors and motifs negotiate questions of national identity, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, socialism/post-socialism, colonialism/post-colonialism, global expansion of capitalism. This class will also offer students a chance to explore multimedia productions as a new mode of critical thinking and creative expression. This course is primarily for sophomores and juniors with a major or minor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. Other students may enroll with permission. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.
Same as L81 EALC 3900
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 419 Theories of Mass Media
This course explores theories of the mass media with an emphasis on television as well as its convergences with other media and computer technologies. It starts by examining theories that posit the media as instruments of societal maintenance or transformation and then examines the ways in which various theorists have refined or rejected elements of these theories in a quest for both specificity and complexity. In particular, the course examines media and cultural studies' attempts to synthesize critical paradigms ranging from political economy to semiotics to feminism. The course concludes with an examination of the challenges and opportunities posed to theorizations of the mass media by contemporary circumstances such as media conglomeration, niche marketing and microcasting, and global flows of information, capital and people. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 420 Film Theory
This course is an introduction to both classical and contemporary film theory. Beginning with the earliest attempts to treat cinema as a new and unique art form, the course initially reviews the various ways in which film theory attempted to define cinema in terms of its most essential properties. The course then examines more contemporary developments within film theory, more specifically its attempt to incorporate the insights of other critical and analytical paradigms, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory and postmodernism. Throughout the course, we consider questions regarding the ontology of cinema, its relation to spectators, and the various ways in which its formal properties create meaning. Readings for the course include the major works of Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey and Fredric Jameson. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 421 Film Historiography
This course is a seminar on the writing of film history for advanced students. Through an engagement with the historiographical writings of scholars, such as Dominic LaCapra, Hayden White and Michel Foucault, students gain an understanding of various genres of film historical writing, an appreciation for the kinds of research that film historians do, and a familiarity with the ways in which film historians delimit their field of study, form research questions and develop hypotheses. In addition to reading and classroom discussions, students are expected to write a fairly lengthy paper (17 to 20 pages) that involves original historical research and the close examination of trade press, professional journals, fan magazines and news articles. As preparatory assignments leading up to the final project, students also prepare project descriptions, bibliographies and outlines that are shared and discussed in a workshop format.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 422 Film Stardom, Performance and Fan Culture
This course focuses the Hollywood star system. We explore stars in relation to celebrity and consumerism, especially how "stardom" is created by a system that seeks to create effects in film viewers whether conceived as audiences, fans or spectators. We examine the performance element of stardom and its relationship to genre, style and changing film technology. Also of concern is how stars and the discursive construction of stardom intersect with gender representation, race, ideology, sexuality, age, disability, nationality and other points of theoretical interest to and historical inquiry in contemporary film studies. While emphasis is placed on mainstream commercial U.S. cinema, students are encouraged to pursue questions beyond this framework within their own research. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 423 Histories of Media Convergence
Entertainment and communications forms combine and blend, and they have done so across millennia. However, the phenomenon of media convergence has taken on a special salience over the last one-and-a-half-centuries, as exemplified by the growing intermixture of film, radio, television, gaming and the internet. In particular, critics, consumers, politicians and producers used convergence as structuring principle in understanding, regulating and planning for the future of media culture. This course engages with contemporary worries and enthusiasms about convergence by considering the specific conditions in which the phenomenon has been understood and practiced. Tracing a historical arc though the 20th century, we first examine convergences of radio and film, film and music publishing, television and film exhibition, and disparate corporate entities as basis for understanding more recent media combinations. Building on that foundation, the majority of the course consists of case studies of media convergence since 1980, considering it in terms of industry, technology, regulation and audiences. These case studies also provide students with a survey of and inquiry into questions of historiographic theory and method. Note: This course satisfies the history and historiography requirement for the FMS Graduate Certificate. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 424 Broadcasting Equality: Radio, Television, and Social Change in Postwar America
The period between World War II and the 1970s was one of profound cultural, political, and demographic shifts that brought the problems of ethno-religious and racial prejudice to the forefront of U.S. national consciousness. Religious leaders, secular social activists, media industry professionals, and African American civil rights leaders often worked together to combat intolerance, bigotry, and inequality. What did these activists achieve in their attempts to deploy U.S. broadcast media in what they sometimes referred to as "propaganda against prejudice"? How did this activism relate to the institutions of broadcast media, including governmental agencies, national networks and local broadcasters? What was television and radio's impact on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s? In addressing these questions, we will consider a wide range of media: public service programming as well as commercially produced series, specials, network news and documentaries produced between the 1940s and the 1970s. Programs considered will include A New World 'A Coming, Amos 'n Andy, ' American Bandstand, NBC White Papers: Sit In, Sanford and Son, Eyes on the Prize, and Soul Train, among many others. REQUIRED SCREENING
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD EN: H
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L53 Film 425 Seminar in Video Games: Video Games, Gender and Sexuality
This seminar considers different topics that illuminate the relationship of video games to culture. Topics vary by semester. The course may have a variety of analytical frames: gender and sexuality, interactivity and reception, narrative and aesthetic theory, industrial or technological history. Prerequisite is graduate status or completion of a 300-level FMS or WGSS course and permission of the instructor. Credit 3 units. REQUIRED LAB/SCREENING TIME weekly.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 429 Mass Culture and Modern Media: Fantasylands: Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Spatial Imagination
This course provides an introduction to cultural theories that are pertinent to the study of cinema, mass culture, and modernity. Rotating topics will highlight different aspects of cinema's relationship to popular culture, urbanism, modern technology, capitalism, and mass media. Students will encounter key theorists for understanding modern life and subjectivity, such as Marx, Freud, Foucault, Benjamin, and Raymond Williams. In addition, the course introduces core readings in the history and cultural theory of early cinema, which may include work by Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, Giuliana Bruno, Jacqueline Stewart, and others. Topics may include cinema and modernity, cinema and mass culture, cinema and leisure, cinema and urbanism, and cinema and consumer culture.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 430 Clown Princes
"Dying is easy, comedy is hard," runs an old theatrical adage. Nevertheless, some of the most popular actors in American film have chosen the hard path by typecasting themselves in comedy, playing repeated variations on the same character. "Comedian comedy," representing films that showcase the distinctive skills of great clown-actors, is the central concern of this course. We analyze how individual comedians rework performance traditions through the distinctive concerns of their time and culture to create idiosyncratic comic personae. We look at films starring Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Peter Sellers, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy. Work for the course requires reading in comic theory and analytical essays. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 4300 Topics in Chinese Media Culture: Charting Identity in the Digital Age
In contemporary society, global computational media have come to shape the new form and function of identity. As the users of these digital technologies, we have been conscripted into systems of compulsory identification ranging from fingerprint scanning and biometric facial recognition to big data documenting and calculating our age, gender, race, nationality, and even health conditions and shopping preferences. These technologies of identification promise to measure a truthful and core identity from the surface of a human body for the purposes of authentication, verification, and tracking in service of a mixture of commercial, state, and military interests. One dire consequence of the proliferation of these technologies of identification is the failure to recognize non-normative, minoritarian groups, and thereby replicating or even amplifying racial hierarchies, gender stereotypes, social division, and global inequality. This course asks what identity is and what function identity serves in the contemporary society in East Asia and on a global scale. Recognizing the changing scope of "Asia" as a vital concept and method, students will read extensively contemporary works in Asian Studies, Asian-American Studies, critical race and gender theory, and media theory that deal with the intersection of digital media, race and gender, and global socio-political transformation. Alongside these readings, students will explore contemporary films, artworks, social media events, and online activisms in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond that reflect the questions of technologized identity and subjectivity. The class will also go back to western philosophies of technology, cybernetics, and media theories to rethink how the universalized prototype of the human (which is a white man) was constructed in scholars' inquiries into mind and body, the self and the other, and the then-new relationship between human and machine. Prerequisites: junior level or above or permission of instructor.
Same as L81 EALC 430
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 431 Renegades and Radicals: The Japanese New Wave
In 1960, the major studio Shochiku promoted a new crop of directors as the "Japanese New Wave" in response to declining theater attendance, a booming youth culture, and the international success of the French Nouvelle Vague. This course provides an introduction to those iconoclastic filmmakers, who went on to break with major studios and revolutionize oppositional filmmaking in Japan. We will analyze the challenging politics and aesthetics of these confrontational films for what they tell us about Japan's modern history and cinema. The films provoke as well as entertain, providing trenchant (sometimes absurd) commentaries on postwar Japanese society and its transformations. Themes include: the legacy of WWII and Japanese imperialism; the student movement; juvenile delinquency; sexual liberation; and Tokyo subcultures. Directors include: Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, Terayama Shuji, Masumura Yasuzo, Suzuki Seijun, Matsumoto Toshio, and others. No knowledge of Japanese necessary. Mandatory weekly screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 432 Global Art Cinema
How do art films tell stories? The dominant storytelling genre of the contemporary festival circuit, the art film has since World War II combined "realist" and "modernist" impulses. Influenced by Italian neorealism, art films grant priority to characters from working class, sexual and other exploited and imperiled minorities. Drawing on the fine arts, literature and music, art films also experiment with modernist themes and formal principles, such as subjectivity, duration serial structure, denotative ambiguity and reflexivity. This course explores art cinema from a variety of national contexts, analyzing storytelling techniques and themes that challenge the "economical" and diverting forms associated with mainstream commercial filmmaking. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 443 Memory, Tears and Longing: East Asian Melodrama Film
Excessive emotion, unreasonable sacrifice, hidden truth, untimely knowledge, and forbidden desire — the power of melodrama and its moving representations have fueled the popularity of hundreds, if not thousands, of books, plays and films. Melodrama has variously been defined as a genre, a logic, an effect and a mode, applied to diverse media, divergent cultural traditions, and different historical contexts. The course provides a survey of East Asian melodrama films — as well as films that challenge conventional definitions of melodrama — by pairing Japanese-, Korean-, and Chinese-language productions with key critical texts in melodrama studies. We see classics such as Tokyo Story, Two Stage Sisters, and The Housemaid. We examine melodrama's complex ties to modernity, tradition and cultural transformation in East Asia; special emphasis is placed on representations of the family, historical change, gender and sexuality. In addition to historical background and film studies concepts, we also consider a range of approaches for thinking about the aesthetics and politics of emotion. No prerequisites. No prior knowledge of East Asian culture or language necessary. Mandatory weekly scheduled screening.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L53 Film 444 Topics in Chinese Language Cinema
Variable topics associated with the shaping of Chinese-language cinema, whether originating from the PRC, Hong Kong or Taiwan. This course may take up themes, directors, film genres, special subjects (such as independent film), formal elements (such as cinematography or sound) or issues (the relationship of film to literature, specific cultural movements or political events). Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 445 Horror in Japanese Media
Elements of the macabre and horrific have been present in Japanese culture and media since time immemorial. The 11th-century work The Tale of Genji, for example, features an elite lady's "living ghost" killing off her main rivals for the prince's affections. Tales of ghosts, demons, and the supernatural entities known as yokai continued to appear in collections of Buddhist didactic and folktale literature of the following centuries, finding renewed popularity in the 17th-19th centuries in the form of kaidan or "strange tales" which were enjoyed as printed works, parlor games, and stage plays. Some of the very first films made at the turn of the 20th century in Japan were about the popular ghosts of yore. Building on this long legacy of fearsome creatures in popular media of times now past, this course will consider selections of Japanese horror media (film, literature, anime, manga, and video games) from the mid-20th to early 21st centuries, highlighting the intertextuality that different media within the horror genre has and how the horror genre itself even bleeds into other genres. Analyzing major figures and themes in each work, this course will explore how Japanese horror -the strange realm home to ghosts with a grudge, misunderstood monsters, and merciless murderers-can function not only as thrilling entertainment but can also reflect Japanese societal and cultural anxieties present in the real world, ranging from the problems that technology may create in a changing world to the threats posed by shifts in traditional family dynamics. Although this course will focus on horror media in the Japanese context, understanding how horror can function to highlight such anxieties will prepare students to consider the deeper possibilities of horror media in their own respective cultural contexts. All readings will be in English, and visual media will be in Japanese with English subtitles. Required Screenings
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 446 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Through Cinema
The Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" is often considered the longest-running national conflict in the world. The "dispute," which started in the early 20th century, attracts much attention more than a hundred year later, stirring intense passions and generating controversial headlines. This course explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict though Palestinian and Israeli cinema. We examine the ways in which cinema depicts the conflict in the Middle East, starting from the British Mandate to the present day. Adopting a relational history reading, the course examines the "treatment," the influences, and the representation of major historical and political events in the region - Israeli independence/Palestinian Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War/Arab Naksa (1967), the Yum Kippur war (1973), the Lebanon War I (1982), the Palestinian uprising Intifada I (1987), the Oslo accords (1993), Intifada II (2000) - in both Israeli and Palestinian films. The course examines the social and historical processes which shape Palestinian and Israeli cinematic narratives, self-representation, the representation of the Other, the relationship to the land, diaspora, national narratives, collective memory, and trauma. This course offers a dialectical cinematic and historic journey from national films to transnational modernist and experimental films, from the collective to the individual, and from hope to despair. Required Screenings:
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 450 American Film Genres
By close examination of three or four specific types of film narratives, this course will explore how genre has functioned in the Hollywood mode of production. Students will gain an understanding of genre both as a critical construct as well as a form created by practical economic concerns, a means of creating extratextual communication between film artist/producers and audience/consumers. Genres for study will be chosen from the western, the gangster film, the horror movie, the musical, screwball comedy, science fiction, the family melodrama, the woman's film, and others. In addition to film showings, there will be readings in genre theory as well as genre analyses of individual films. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 451 American Television Genres
Questions of genre are central to any exploration of television's texts, whether they are being analyzed as craft, commerce or cultural phenomenon. Genre has been used by critics and historians to ascribe "social functions" to groups of programs and to diagnose cultural preoccupations, while genre has been used industrially to manage expectations among audiences, advertisers, programmers, producers and creative professionals. Investigating genres ranging from the soap opera to the Western, workplace situation comedies to sports, and game shows to cop shows, this course explores the role of genre in the production, distribution and reception of American television. Students gain a critical understanding of genre theory and key arguments about the form and function of television texts; they develop a set of tools for analysis of televisual narrative and style; the social uses and meanings of genre; the institutional practices and presumptions of the American television industry; and the persistence of textual forms and audience formations in the face of structural changes such as deregulation, media convergence and globalization. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 452 Advanced Screenwriting
This course is intended for students who already have taken Film 352 Introduction to Screenwriting. Building on past writing experiences, students explore the demands of writing feature-length screenplays, adaptations and experimental forms. Particular attention is paid to the task of rewriting.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 453 Experimental Design for Immersive Media
The term "metaverse" (originally coined by novelist Neal Stephenson) has recently come into vogue to describe a loose constellation of emerging technologies related to immersive media-particularly virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. In this course, we will explore new forms of creative practice enabled by this ecosystem. Students will analyze a variety of immersive experiences, ranging from 360 films and animations to interactive room scale experiences to multisensory installations, to understand the creative opportunities and challenges offered by these media. Students will then develop their own creative proposals and prototype an XR experience using a combination of 360 camera systems, digital production software, head-mounted displays, and physical and spatial computing elements.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM, VC EN: H
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L53 Film 454 American Film Melodrama and the Gothic
American film melodrama has been considered both the genre of suffering protagonists, incredible coincidences and weeping spectators as well as a mode of action, suspense and in-the-nick-of-time rescues. In this course, we examine American film melodrama as a dialectic of sentiment and sensation that draws heavily on Gothic tropes of terror, live burial and haunted internal states. We trace the origins of film melodrama and the cinematic Gothic to their literary antecedents, the horrors of the French Revolution, and classical and sensational stage melodramas of the 19th century. In addition to the 1940s Gothic woman's film cycle, we excavate the Gothic in the maternal melodrama, the suspense thriller, film noir, domestic melodrama, the slasher film and the supernatural horror film. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 457 From Vitaphone to YouTube: Popular Music and the Moving Image
This course considers American popular music as represented in audiovisual media from 1926 to the present. The relationship between the popular music industry (a commercial sphere oriented primarily toward the selling of sheet music and audio recordings) and audiovisual technologies (various screens and formats encountered in changing social and commercial contexts) will be explored along two complementary tracks: popular music performers as presented in performance-centered media and popular music as a narrative topic or resource in feature films. Three related analytical frames will shape our discussions: industrial and technological history (the material conditions for the making and distribution of popular music and moving images); the question of "liveness" in recorded audiovisual media; aesthetics of various popular music styles as translated into audiovisual forms and contexts. The course is in seminar format. The ability to read music is not required but students with music reading or transcription skills will be encouraged to draw upon these tools. Prerequisites: graduate status or completion of a 300-level FMS or Music course and permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 458 Major Film Directors
What does the film director do? In the earliest movies, film directors modeled themselves on their theatrical counterparts: they chiefly focused on how to stage an action in a confined space for a stationary camera that represented an ideal member of the audience. As the camera began to be used to direct audience attention, first through cutting, then through actual movement, the film director evolved from a stager of events to a narrator. By analyzing the work of one or more major film directors, this course explores the art of film direction. We learn how film directors may use the camera to narrate a scene, to provide their own distinctive view of the actions playing out on the movie screen. May be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 460 Taboo: Contesting Race, Sexuality and Violence in American Cinema
Pushing the envelope or going too far? What is the boundary between films that challenge us and films that offend us? This is a course about films that crossed that boundary, most often by presenting images of race, sexuality and violence, images that could attract audiences as much as they offended moral guardians and courted legal sanctions. Because they were denied the First Amendment protection of free speech by a 1915 Supreme Court decision, movies more than any prior art form were repeatedly subject to various attempts at regulating content by government at federal, state and even municipal levels. Trying to stave off government control, Hollywood instituted forms of self-regulation, first in a rigid regime of censorship and subsequently in the ratings system still in use. Because taboo content often means commercial success, Hollywood could nonetheless produce films that pushed the envelope and occasionally crossed over into more transgressive territory. While control of content is a top-down attempt to impose moral norms and standards of behavior on a diverse audience, it also reflects changing standards of acceptable public discourse. That topics once barred from dramatic representation by the Production Code — miscegenation, homosexuality and "lower forms of sexuality," abortion, drug addiction — could eventually find a place in American movies speaks to changes in the culture at large. In trying to understand these cultural changes, this course explores films that challenged taboos, defied censorship and caused outrage, ranging from films in the early 20th century that brought on the first attempts to control film content through to films released under the ratings system, which has exerted subtler forms of control. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: CPSC EN: H
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L53 Film 465 Theory and Practice of Experimental Film
Filmmaker Stan Brakhage famously wrote the following: "Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." In this course, we will embark upon our own adventures of perception, examining and producing works of art that challenge our preconceptions of what cinema is or can be. From city symphonies to pop collages, portraiture to handcrafted animation, and ethnography to gender studies, we will explore the multifaceted and transformative avant-garde cinema through the work of its greatest practitioners, contextualize films in relation to aesthetic aspirations (e.g., formalism, opposition, reflexivity, transcendence) and movements in art and cultural theory (e.g., Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Performance Art, Minimalism), and acquire the digital production skills needed to make our own experimental videos. Each week, we will mix the classic with the contemporary to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of — and make our own contributions to — this often misunderstood cinematic tradition. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 475 Screening the Holocaust
This course surveys the history of Holocaust representation on film, examining a wide range of documentary and fictional works from 1945 to the present day. Discussions will consider a number of key questions, including: What challenges does the Holocaust pose to cinematic representation, and how have filmmakers grappled with them? How have directors worked within and against notions of the Holocaust as unrepresentable, and how have they confronted the challenge of its association with a limited set of highly iconic images? What are the more general ethical and political dimensions of representing the Holocaust onscreen -- its victims as well as its perpetrators, the systematic genocidal violence that characterized it, and the sheer absence of so many dead? We will also probe the changing significance of cinematic representation of the Holocaust, exploring the medium's increasingly memorial function for audiences ever further removed from the historical moment of its occurrence. Screenings may include The Last Stage; Distant Journey; Night and Fog; Judgment at Nuremberg; Shoah; Europa, Europa; Schindler's List; Train of Life; The Specialist; Photographer; A Film Unfinished. Critical readings by figures such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Amery, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Sidra Israhi, Dominick LaCapra, Alison Landsberg, Berel Lang, Michael Rothberg, and James Young. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L53 Film 478 Topics in Transmedia Franchises
This variable topics course for advanced undergraduate and graduate students is an interdisciplinary seminar on transmedia franchises. In particular, it is recommended for those seeking to understand transmedia storytelling as an artistic, industrial, and cultural practice. As such, this course will bring into conversation various methodologies and perspectives, including film and media scholarship as well as other fields of study in the humanities and social sciences. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to illuminate how transmedia franchises have developed since the early 20th century to become the dominant product of the American -- and, increasingly, global -- cultural industries. Foci of this course may include such topics as individual franchises; global transmedia history; the franchise strategies of individual cultural industries (e.g., the Japanese media mix); or representation within franchise texts, production cultures, and fan communities. This course serves as a capstone for Film & Media Studies majors. Weekly or bi-weekly screenings or hands-on media labs are required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L53 Film 479 (In)Visible Media: Connection and Crisis in Contemporary Japan
This variable topics course is an interdisciplinary seminar on film/media designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. In particular, it is recommended for those seeking to understand film/media as a lived experience that takes place within cultural frameworks. As such, this course will bring into conversation various methodologies and perspectives, including film/media scholarship, as well as ones drawn from other fields of study in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to illuminate how film/media both elicits and represents human response. The foci of this course may include such topics as violence and film/media, the body and film/media, the cognitive impact of film/media viewing, the relationship of environment to experiencing film/media, or the relationship of culturally specific events or trends to film/media production and reception. This course serves as a capstone for Film & Media Studies majors. Weekly or biweekly screenings or hands-on media labs required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 485 Visualizing Orientalism: Art, Cinema and the Imaginary East 1850-2000
This seminar examines film and modern art within the framework of "Orientalism." Reading foundational texts by Said, and incorporating theory and historical discourse concerned with race, nationalism and colonialism, we explore artistic practice in European photography, painting and decorative arts from 1850 to recent times and European and Hollywood film. We study how power and desire have been inscribed in Western visual culture across the bodies of nations and peoples through conventions such as the harem, the odalisque, the desert and the mysteries of ancient Egypt. To that end, we look at artists such as Delacroix, Ingres, Gérôme, Beardsley and Matisse and screen films such as The Sheik, The Mummy, Salome, Cleopatra, Pepe le Moko, Naked Lunch, Shanghai Gesture, Thief of Baghdad, Princess Tam Tam and The Sheltering Sky. Subjects include the representation of gender, sexuality, desire, race and identity as well as the cultural impact of stereotype and "exotic" spectacle. Students study methods of visual analysis in film studies and art history. All students must attend film screenings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD EN: H
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L53 Film 495 Special Projects
This course is intended for juniors and seniors who wish to register for internships. Students must receive program approval prior to beginning the internship. Please consult the program guidelines governing internships.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L53 Film 499 Study for Honors
This course is intended for majors pursuing honors in Film and Media Studies. In order to enroll for this course, students must apply in advance for honors and be approved by a faculty committee. Please consult the Program guidelines for application deadlines and other requirements.
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 500 Independent Study
This course is intended for students who wish to pursue areas of study not available within the standard curriculum. In order to enroll for this course, students must have a faculty advisor and submit a contract outlining the work for the course to the Film and Media Studies office. Please consult the Program guidelines governing independent study work. Opportunities for Independent Study are available to all undergraduate and graduate students working toward a degree in Arts and Sciences. Registration in an Independent Study requires sponsorship by a faculty member and approval of the Program Director. An Independent Study Proposal form can be obtained from the Film and Media Studies Office. All proposals for Film 500 have to be submitted to the FMS main office no later than November 1 for spring semester enrollment and April 1 for Film 500 to be taken in the fall semester. Approval is not automatic.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L53 Film 5000 Independent Study
This course is intended for students who wish to pursue areas of study not available within the standard curriculum. In order to enroll for this course, students must have a faculty adviser and submit a contract outlining the work for the course to the Film and Media Studies office. Please consult the Program guidelines governing independent study work. Opportunities for Independent Study are available to all undergraduate and graduate students working toward a degree in Arts and Sciences. Registration in an Independent Study requires sponsorship by a faculty member and approval of the Program Director. An Independent Study Proposal form can be obtained from the Film and Media Studies Office. All proposals for Film 500 have to be submitted to the FMS main office no later than November 1 for spring semester enrollment and April 1 for Film 500 to be taken in the fall semester. Approval is not automatic.
Same as L53 Film 500
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L53 Film 501 Advanced Moving Image Analysis and Criticism
This course will explore the analytical tools that have served as the foundation for cinematic and televisual academic criticism. The variety of texts, visual and aural, that comprise moving image production will be considered with the aim of determining how textual strategies structure perception. The aim of the course is two-fold: to have students develop analytical skills for dealing with film and video texts, but also to see how these have been deployed in a multiplicity of approaches/applications offered by academic film criticism. There will be regular screenings to provide the material for analysis, as well as readings to offer a variety of critical models. REQUIRED SCREENINGS:
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 505 Travel in Space: Contemporary Cinemas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China
The recent phase of intensive urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in Chinese regions has also mobilized multi-directional flows of migrants, tourists, workers and entrepreneurs across geographical boundaries. Moving through space, the voyagers offer changing perspectives to the cinematic mapping of socio-political relationships, histories, and cultures that constitute the identities of places. This course explores contemporary Chinese-language films that imagine trajectories between distant spaces as well as the experiences of "new comers" in "foreign" places. We will examine the current wave of travel films in Taiwan, the representation of drifters in Chinese urban films, as well as the imagination of migration in Hong Kong cinema. We will also explore theories that draw connections between movement, space, and cinema. REQUIRED SCREENINGS: TBA
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 507 The 007 Saga: James Bond and The Modern Media Franchise
What is a franchise, and what approaches have scholars used to study the franchise as a modern cultural and commercial form? This course explores the phenomenon of the modern media franchise in light of the "007 saga": the stories of James Bond as they have proliferated in various media since the 1950s, including the Ian Fleming novels, television, comics, film, games, and young adult and fan fiction (including slash fiction). The 007 saga presents an opportunity to re-examine available ways of conceiving the franchise, from transmedia storytelling to media mixing, and it emphasizes the importance of scholarly models that can account for a decentralized creative labor. Throughout the history of Bond fiction, authorized and unauthorized writers have generated what now amounts to a threaded storytelling experience with pleasures that overlap with -- but are distinct from -- those of centrally planned media phenomena, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Note: Admission by waitlist only. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate majors in Film and Media Studies will have priority. Required screenings.
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 510 Graduate Practicum in Film & Media Studies
The practicum in Film & Media Studies seeks to make our graduate students more competitive in the job market. It consists of professional experience that brings to bear academic knowledge and skills associated with the graduate study of moving image media (film, television, digital). The practicum may take a number of forms, but in every case, the experience must be planned in a way that contributes to the student's professional development. It might consist of work curating films for a screening or mini-festival accompanied by screening notes or other activities that enhance the academic value of the event. The student might organize a reading group or a scholarly symposium or lecture series to further the understanding of a particular aspect of the moving image on campus. The practicum may also consist of archival, or curatorial work in forms of the moving image at an archive, museum, or other non-profit organization (such as the St. Louis International Film Festival). The student might also pursue a film/media-centered oral history project or develop a film/media-centered blog or engage in other forms of writing that have a public presence. Students may initiate other projects, but any practicum requires a faculty mentor and in circumstances in which there is a collaborating organization, a letter of endorsement of the practicum from the student's on-site supervisor. Every student presents a written proposal/plan for any practicum to the DGS and to the faculty mentor/advisor. Both faculty must give permission to the plan and determine the appropriate number of credit hours (variable 1 to 3). Students may sign up for the practicum more than once to satisfy the 3 credits required in this area for the FMS master's degree; however, only one practicum should be pursued in a given semester. If there is a site supervisor, she/he must provide a letter upon completion of the practicum detailing the student's work and its quality. The student must provide a brief narrative (2 to 5 pages) detailing how the practicum served as a learning experience. The faculty advisor will award the grade for the practicum.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L53 Film 5419 Theories of Mass Media
This course explores theories of the mass media with an emphasis on television as well as its convergences with other media and computer technologies. It starts by examining theories that posit the media as instruments of societal maintenance or transformation and then examines the ways in which various theorists have refined or rejected elements of these theories in a quest for both specificity and complexity. In particular, the course examines media and cultural studies' attempts to synthesize critical paradigms ranging from political economy to semiotics to feminism. The course concludes with an examination of the challenges and opportunities posed to theorizations of the mass media by contemporary circumstances such as media conglomeration, niche marketing and micro-casting, and global flows of information, capital, and people. REQUIRED SCREENING: [day, time].
Same as L53 Film 419
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 5420 Film Theory
This course is an introduction to both classical and contemporary film theory. Beginning with the earliest attempts to treat cinema as a new and unique art form, the course will initially review the various ways in which film theory attempted to define cinema in terms of its most essential properties. The course will then examine more contemporary developments within film theory, more specifically its attempt to incorporate the insights of other critical and analytical paradigms, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and postmodernism. Throughout the course, we will consider questions regarding the ontology of cinema, its relation to spectators, and the various ways in which its formal properties create meaning. Readings for the course will include the major works of Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Fredric Jameson. Required screenings.
Same as L53 Film 420
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5422 Film Stardom, Performance, and Fan Culture
This course focuses the Hollywood star system. We will explore stars in relation to celebrity and consumerism, especially how "stardom" is created by a system that seeks to create effects in film viewers whether conceived as audiences, fans, or spectators. We will examine the performance element of stardom and its relationship to genre, style, and changing film technology. Also of concern will be how stars and the discursive construction of stardom intersect with gender representation, race, ideology, sexuality, age, disability, nationality, and other points of theoretical interest to and historical inquiry in contemporary film studies. While emphasis will be placed on mainstream commercial U.S. cinema, students are encouraged to pursue questions beyond this framework within their own research. REQUIRED SCREENING: [day, time].
Same as L53 Film 422
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 5423 Histories of Media Convergence
Entertainment and communications forms combine and blend, and they have done so across millennia. However, the phenomenon of media convergence has taken on a special salience over the last one-and-a-half-centuries, as exemplified by the growing intermixture of film, radio, television, gaming, and the internet. In particular, critics, consumers, politicians, and producers used convergence as structuring principle in understanding, regulating, and planning for the future of media culture. This course engages with contemporary worries and enthusiasms about convergence by considering the specific conditions in which the phenomenon has been understood and practiced. Tracing a historical arc though the Twentieth Century, we will first examine convergences of radio and film, film and music publishing, television and film exhibition, and disparate corporate entities as basis for understanding more recent media combinations. Building on that foundation, the majority of the course will consist of case studies of media convergence since 1980, considering it in terms of industry, technology, regulation, and audiences. These case studies will also provide students with a survey of and inquiry into questions of historiographic theory and method. Note: This course satisfies the history & historiography requirement for the FMS Graduate Certificate. Required Screenings.
Same as L53 Film 423
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5429 Mass Culture and Modern Media: Fantasylands: Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Spatial Imagination
This course provides an introduction to cultural theories that are pertinent to the study of cinema, mass culture, and modernity. Rotating topics will highlight different aspects of cinema's relationship to popular culture, urbanism, modern technology, capitalism, and mass media. Students will encounter key theorists for understanding modern life and subjectivity, such as Marx, Freud, Foucault, Benjamin, and Raymond Williams. In addition, the course introduces core readings in the history and cultural theory of early cinema, which may include work by Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, Giuliana Bruno, Jacqueline Stewart, and others. Topics may include cinema and modernity, cinema and mass culture, cinema and leisure, cinema and urbanism, and cinema and consumer culture.
Same as L53 Film 429
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5430 Topics in Chinese Media Culture: Charting Identity in the Digital Age
In contemporary society, global computational media have come to shape the new form and function of identity. As the users of these digital technologies, we have been conscripted into systems of compulsory identification ranging from fingerprint scanning and biometric facial recognition to big data documenting and calculating our age, gender, race, nationality, and even health conditions and shopping preferences. These technologies of identification promise to measure a truthful and core identity from the surface of a human body for the purposes of authentication, verification, and tracking in service of a mixture of commercial, state, and military interests. One dire consequence of the proliferation of these technologies of identification is the failure to recognize non-normative, minoritarian groups, and thereby replicating or even amplifying racial hierarchies, gender stereotypes, social division, and global inequality. This course asks what identity is and what function identity serves in the contemporary society in East Asia and on a global scale. Recognizing the changing scope of "Asia" as a vital concept and method, students will read extensively contemporary works in Asian Studies, Asian-American Studies, critical race and gender theory, and media theory that deal with the intersection of digital media, race and gender, and global socio-political transformation. Alongside these readings, students will explore contemporary films, artworks, social media events, and online activisms in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond that reflect the questions of technologized identity and subjectivity. The class will also go back to western philosophies of technology, cybernetics, and media theories to rethink how the universalized prototype of the human (which is a white man) was constructed in scholars' inquiries into mind and body, the self and the other, and the then-new relationship between human and machine. Prerequisites: junior level or above or permission of instructor.
Same as L81 EALC 430
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 5431 Renegades and Radicals: The Japanese New Wave
In 1960, the major studio Shochiku promoted a new crop of directors as the "Japanese New Wave" in response to declining theater attendance, a booming youth culture, and the international success of the French Nouvelle Vague. This course provides an introduction to those iconoclastic filmmakers, who went on to break with major studios and revolutionize oppositional filmmaking in Japan. We will analyze the challenging politics and aesthetics of these confrontational films for what they tell us about Japan's modern history and cinema. The films provoke as well as entertain, providing trenchant (sometimes absurd) commentaries on postwar Japanese society and its transformations. Themes include: the legacy of WWII and Japanese imperialism; the student movement; juvenile delinquency; sexual liberation; and Tokyo subcultures. Directors include: Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, Terayama Shuji, Masumura Yasuzo, Suzuki Seijun, Matsumoto Toshio, and others. No knowledge of Japanese necessary. Credit 3 units. Mandatory weekly screening:
Same as L53 Film 431
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L53 Film 5432 Global Art Cinema
How do art films tell stories? The dominant storytelling genre of the contemporary festival circuit, the art film has since World War Two combined "realist" and "modernist" impulses. Influenced by Italian neorealism, art films grant priority to characters from working class, sexual, and other exploited and imperiled minorities. Drawing on the fine arts, literature and music, art films also experiment with modernist themes and formal principles, such as subjectivity, duration, serial structure, denotative ambiguity and reflexivity. This course explores art cinema from a variety of national contexts, analyzing storytelling techniques and themes that challenge the "economical" and diverting forms associated with mainstream commercial filmmaking. Required Screenings.
Same as L53 Film 432
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L53 Film 5439 Clown Princes
"Dying is easy, comedy is hard," runs an old theatrical adage. Nevertheless, some of the most popular actors in American film have chosen the hard path by typecasting themselves in comedy, playing repeated variations on the same character. "Comedian comedy," representing films that showcase the distinctive skills of great clown-actors, is the central concern of this course. We will analyze how individual comedians rework performance traditions through the distinctive concerns of their time and culture to create idiosyncratic comic personae. We will look at films starring Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Peter Sellers, Jim Carey and Eddie Murphy. Work for the course will require reading in comic theory and analytical essays. Required screenings.
Same as L53 Film 430
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5443 Memory, Tears and Longing: East Asian Melodrama Film
Excessive emotion, unreasonable sacrifice, hidden truth, untimely knowledge, and forbidden desire-the power of melodrama and its moving representations have fueled the popularity of hundreds, if not thousands, of books, plays, and films. Melodrama has variously been defined as a genre, a logic, an affect, and a mode, applied to diverse media, divergent cultural traditions, and different historical contexts. The course provides a survey of East Asian melodrama films-as well as films that challenge conventional definitions of melodrama-by pairing Japanese, Korean, and Chinese-language productions with key critical texts in melodrama studies. We will see classics such as Tokyo Story, Two Stage Sisters, and The Housemaid. We will examine melodrama's complex ties to modernity, tradition, and cultural transformation in East Asia; special emphasis will be placed on representations of the family, historical change, gender, and sexuality. In addition to historical background and film studies concepts, we will also consider a range of approaches for thinking about the aesthetics and politics of emotion. No prerequisites. No prior knowledge of East Asian culture or language necessary. Mandatory weekly scheduled screening.
Same as L53 Film 443
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L53 Film 5445 Horror in Japanese Media
Elements of the macabre and horrific have been present in Japanese culture and media since time immemorial. The 11th-century work The Tale of Genji, for example, features an elite lady's "living ghost" killing off her main rivals for the prince's affections. Tales of ghosts, demons, and the supernatural entities known as yokai continued to appear in collections of Buddhist didactic and folktale literature of the following centuries, finding renewed popularity in the 17th-19th centuries in the form of kaidan or "strange tales" which were enjoyed as printed works, parlor games, and stage plays. Some of the very first films made at the turn of the 20th century in Japan were about the popular ghosts of yore. Building on this long legacy of fearsome creatures in popular media of times now past, this course will consider selections of Japanese horror media (film, literature, anime, manga, and video games) from the mid-20th to early 21st centuries, highlighting the intertextuality that different media within the horror genre has and how the horror genre itself even bleeds into other genres. Analyzing major figures and themes in each work, this course will explore how Japanese horror -the strange realm home to ghosts with a grudge, misunderstood monsters, and merciless murderers-can function not only as thrilling entertainment but can also reflect Japanese societal and cultural anxieties present in the real world, ranging from the problems that technology may create in a changing world to the threats posed by shifts in traditional family dynamics. Although this course will focus on horror media in the Japanese context, understanding how horror can function to highlight such anxieties will prepare students to consider the deeper possibilities of horror media in their own respective cultural contexts. All readings will be in English, and visual media will be in Japanese with English subtitles. Required Screenings
Same as L53 Film 445
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5446 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Through Cinema
The Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" is often considered the longest-running national conflict in the world. The "dispute," which started in the early 20th century, attracts much attention more than a hundred year later, stirring intense passions and generating controversial headlines. This course explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict though Palestinian and Israeli cinema. We examine the ways in which cinema depicts the conflict in the Middle East, starting from the British Mandate to the present day. Adopting a relational history reading, the course examines the "treatment," the influences, and the representation of major historical and political events in the region - Israeli independence/Palestinian Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War/Arab Naksa (1967), the Yum Kippur war (1973), the Lebanon War I (1982), the Palestinian uprising Intifada I (1987), the Oslo accords (1993), Intifada II (2000) - in both Israeli and Palestinian films. The course examines the social and historical processes which shape Palestinian and Israeli cinematic narratives, self-representation, the representation of the Other, the relationship to the land, diaspora, national narratives, collective memory, and trauma. This course offers a dialectical cinematic and historic journey from national films to transnational modernist and experimental films, from the collective to the individual, and from hope to despair. Required Screenings:
Same as L53 Film 446
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5450 American Film Genres
By close examination of three or four specific types of film narratives, this course will explore how genre has functioned in the Hollywood mode of production. Students will gain an understanding of genre both as a critical construct as well as a form created by practical economic concerns, a means of creating extratextual communication between film artist/producers and audience/consumers. Genres for study will be chosen from the western, the gangster film, the horror movie, the musical, screwball comedy, science fiction, the family melodrama, the woman's film, and others. In addition to film showings, there will be readings in genre theory as well as genre analyses of individual films. Required screenings
Same as L53 Film 450
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5451 American Television Genres
Questions of genre are central to any exploration of television's texts, whether they are being analyzed as craft, commerce, or cultural phenomenon. Genre has been used by critics and historians to ascribe "social functions" to groups of programs and to diagnose cultural preoccupations, while genre has been used industrially to manage expectations among audiences, advertisers, programmers, producers, and creative professionals. Investigating genres ranging from the soap opera to the western, workplace situation comedies to sports, and game shows to cop shows, this course will explore the role of genre in the production, distribution, and reception of American television. Students will gain a critical understanding of genre theory and key arguments about the form and function of television texts and will develop a set of tools for analysis of televisual narrative and style, the social uses and meanings of genre, the institutional practices and presumptions of the American television industry, and the persistence of textual forms and audience formations in the face of structural changes such as deregulation, media convergence, and globalization. Required Screenings.
Same as L53 Film 451
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L53 Film 5452 Advanced Screenwriting
This course is intended for students who have already taken Film Studies 352, "Introduction to Screenwriting." Building on past writing experiences, students will explore the demands of writing feature-length screenplays, adaptations, and experimental forms. Particular attention will be paid to the task of rewriting.
Same as L53 Film 452
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5453 Experiential Design for Immersive Media
The term "metaverse" (originally coined by novelist Neal Stephenson) has recently come into vogue to describe a loose constellation of emerging technologies related to immersive media-particularly virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. In this course, we will explore new forms of creative practice enabled by this ecosystem. Students will analyze a variety of immersive experiences, ranging from 360 films and animations to interactive room scale experiences to multisensory installations, to understand the creative opportunities and challenges offered by these media. Students will then develop their own creative proposals and prototype an XR experience using a combination of 360 camera systems, digital production software, head-mounted displays, and physical and spatial computing elements.
Same as L53 Film 453
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM, VC EN: H
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L53 Film 5454 American Film Melodrama and the Gothic
American film melodrama has been considered both the genre of suffering protagonists, incredible coincidences, and weeping spectators as well as a mode of action, suspense, and in-the-nick-of-time rescues. In this course, we will examine American film melodrama as a dialectic of sentiment and sensation which draws heavily on Gothic tropes of terror, live burial, and haunted internal states. We will trace the origins of film melodrama and the cinematic Gothic to their literary antecedents, the horrors of the French Revolution, and classical and sensational stage melodramas of the nineteenth century. In addition to the 1940s Gothic woman's film cycle, we will excavate the Gothic in the maternal melodrama, the suspense thriller, film noir, domestic melodrama, the slasher film, and the supernatural horror film. Required screenings.
Same as L53 Film 454
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5457 From Vitaphone to YouTube: Popular Music and the Moving Image
This course considers American popular music as represented in audiovisual media from 1926 to the present. The relationship between the popular music industry (a commercial sphere oriented primarily towards the selling of sheet music and audio recordings) and audiovisual technologies (various screens and formats encountered in changing social and commercial contexts) will be explored along two complementary tracks: popular music performers as presented in performance-centered media and popular music as a narrative topic or resource in feature films. Three related analytical frames will shape our discussions: industrial and technological history (the material conditions for the making and distribution of popular music and moving images) the question of "liveness" in recorded audiovisual media aesthetics of various popular music styles as translated into audiovisual forms and contexts The course is in seminar format. The ability to read music is not required but students with music reading or transcription skills will be encouraged to draw upon these tools. Pre-requisites: graduate status or completion of a 300-level FMS or Music course and permission of the instructor
Same as L53 Film 457
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5458 Major Film Directors
What does the film director do? In the earliest movies, film directors modeled themselves on their theatrical counterparts: they chiefly focused on how to stage an action in a confined space for a stationary camera that represented an ideal member of the audience. As the camera began to be used to direct audience attention, first through cutting, then through actual movement, the film director evolved from a stager of events to a narrator. By analyzing the work of one or more major film directors, this course will explore the art of film direction. We will learn how film directors may use the camera to narrate a scene, to provide their own distinctive view of the actions playing out on the movie screen. May be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. REQUIRED SCREENING: [day, time].
Same as L53 Film 458
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5460 Taboo: Contesting Race, Sexuality and Violence in American
Pushing the envelope or going too far? What is the boundary between films that challenge us and films that offend us? This is a course about films that crossed that boundary, most often by presenting images of race, sexuality and violence, images that could attract audiences as much as they offended moral guardians and courted legal sanctions. Because they were denied the First Amendment protection of free speech by a 1915 Supreme Court decision, movies more than any prior art form were repeatedly subject to various attempts at regulating content by government at federal, state, and even municipal levels. Trying to stave off government control, Hollywood instituted forms of self-regulation, first in a rigid regime of censorship and subsequently in the Ratings system still in use. Because taboo content often means commercial success, Hollywood could nonetheless produce films that pushed the envelope and occasionally crossed over into more transgressive territory. While control of content is a top-down attempt to impose moral norms and standards of behavior on a diverse audience, it also reflects changing standards of acceptable public discourse. That topics once barred from dramatic representation by the Production Code - miscegenation, homosexuality and "lower forms of sexuality," abortion, drug addiction - could eventually find a place in American movies speaks to changes in the culture at large. In trying to understand these cultural changes, this course will explore films that challenged taboos, defied censorship, and caused outrage, ranging from films in the early 20th Century that brought on the first attempts to control film content through to films released under the Ratings system, which has exerted subtler forms of control. REQUIRED SCREENING:
Same as L53 Film 460
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: CPSC EN: H
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L53 Film 5465 Theory and Practice of Experimental Film
Filmmaker Stan Brakhage famously wrote the following: "Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." In this course, we will embark upon our own adventures of perception, examining and producing works of art that challenge our preconceptions of what cinema is or can be. From city symphonies to pop collages, portraiture to handcrafted animation, and ethnography to gender studies, we will explore the multifaceted and transformative avant-garde cinema through the work of its greatest practitioners, contextualize films in relation to aesthetic aspirations (e.g., formalism, opposition, reflexivity, transcendence) and movements in art and cultural theory (e.g., Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Performance Art, Minimalism), and acquire the digital production skills needed to make our own experimental videos. Each week, we will mix the classic with the contemporary to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of -- and make our own contributions to -- this often misunderstood cinematic tradition. Required screenings.
Same as L53 Film 465
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5475 Screening the Holocaust
This course surveys the history of Holocaust representation on film, examining a wide range of documentary and fictional works from 1945 to the present day. Discussions will consider a number of key questions, including: What challenges does the Holocaust pose to cinematic representation, and how have filmmakers grappled with them? How have directors worked within and against notions of the Holocaust as unrepresentable, and how have they confronted the challenge of its association with a limited set of highly iconic images? What are the more general ethical and political dimensions of representing the Holocaust onscreen -- its victims as well as its perpetrators, the systematic genocidal violence that characterized it, and the sheer absence of so many dead? We will also probe the changing significance of cinematic representation of the Holocaust, exploring the medium's increasingly memorial function for audiences ever further removed from the historical moment of its occurrence. Screenings may include The Last Stage; Distant Journey; Night and Fog; Judgment at Nuremberg; Shoah; Europa, Europa; Schindler's List; Train of Life; The Specialist; Photographer; A Film Unfinished. Critical readings by figures such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Amery, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Sidra Israhi, Dominick LaCapra, Alison Landsberg, Berel Lang, Michael Rothberg, and James Young. Required screenings
Same as L53 Film 475
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L53 Film 5478 Topics in Transmedia Franchises
This variable topics course for advanced undergraduate and graduate students is an interdisciplinary seminar on transmedia franchises. In particular, it is recommended for those seeking to understand transmedia storytelling as an artistic, industrial, and cultural practice. As such, this course will bring into conversation various methodologies and perspectives, including film and media scholarship as well as other fields of study in the humanities and social sciences. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to illuminate how transmedia franchises have developed since the early 20th century to become the dominant product of the American -- and, increasingly, global -- cultural industries. Foci of this course may include such topics as individual franchises; global transmedia history; the franchise strategies of individual cultural industries (e.g., the Japanese media mix); or representation within franchise texts, production cultures, and fan communities. This course serves as a capstone for Film & Media Studies majors. Weekly or bi-weekly screenings or hands-on media labs are required.
Same as L53 Film 478
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L53 Film 5479 Seminar in Interdisciplinary Approaches
This variable topics course is an interdisciplinary seminar on film/media designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. In particular, it is recommended for those seeking to understand film/media as a lived experience that takes place within cultural frameworks. As such, this course will bring into conversation various methodologies and perspectives, including film/media scholarship, as well as ones drawn from other fields of study in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to illuminate how film/media both elicits and represents human response. The foci of this course may include such topics as violence and film/media, the body and film/media, the cognitive impact of film/media viewing, the relationship of environment to experiencing film/media, or the relationship of culturally specific events or trends to film/media production and reception. This course serves as a capstone for Film & Media Studies majors. Weekly or biweekly screenings or hands-on media labs required.
Same as L53 Film 479
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L53 Film 5485 Visualizing Orientalism: Art, Cinema and the Imaginary East 1850-2000
This seminar examines film and modern art within the framework of "Orientalism" Reading foundational texts by Said, and incorporating theory and historical discourse concerned with race, nationalism, and colonialism, we explore artistic practice in European photography, painting, and decorative arts from 1850 to recent times and European and Hollywood Film. We study how power and desire have been inscribed in western visual culture across the bodies of nations and peoples through conventions such as the harem, the odalisque, the desert, and the mysteries of ancient Egypt. To that end, we will look at artists such as Delacroix, Ingres, Gérôme, Beardsley, and Matisse and will screen films such as _The Sheik_, _The Mummy_, _Salome_, _Cleopatra_, _Pepe le Moko_, _Naked Lunch_, _Shanghai Gesture, Thief of Bagdad, Princess Tam Tam_ and _The Sheltering Sky_. Subjects include the representaion of gender, sexuality, desire, race, and identity as well as the cultural impact of stereotype and "exotic" spectacle. Students will study methods of visual analysis in film studies and art history. All students must attend film screenings. 3 credits
Same as L53 Film 485
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD EN: H
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L53 Film 5501 Advanced Moving Image Analysis and Criticism
This course will explore the analytical tools that have served as the foundation for cinematic and televisual academic criticism. The variety of texts, visual and aural, that comprise moving image production will be considered with the aim of determining how textual strategies structure perception. The aim of the course is two-fold: to have students develop analytical skills for dealing with film and video texts, but also to see how these have been deployed in a multiplicity of approaches/applications offered by academic film criticism. There will be regular screenings to provide the material for analysis, as well as readings to offer a variety of critical models. REQUIRED SCREENINGS:
Same as L53 Film 501
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 5505 Travel in Space: Contemporary Cinemas of Taiwan, Hong Kong and China
The recent phase of intensive urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in Chinese regions has also mobilized multi-directional flows of migrants, tourists, workers and entrepreneurs across geographical boundaries. Moving through space, the voyagers offer changing perspectives to the cinematic mapping of socio-political relationships, histories, and cultures that constitute the identities of places. This course explores contemporary Chinese-language films that imagine trajectories between distant spaces as well as the experiences of "new comers" in "foreign" places. We will examine the current wave of travel films in Taiwan, the representation of drifters in Chinese urban films, as well as the imagination of migration in Hong Kong cinema. We will also explore theories that draw connections between movement, space, and cinema. REQUIRED SCREENINGS: TBA
Same as L53 Film 505
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 5507 The 007 Saga: James Bond and the Modern Media Franchise
What is a franchise, and what approaches have scholars used to study the franchise as a modern cultural and commercial form? This course explores the phenomenon of the modern media franchise in light of the "007 saga": the stories of James Bond as they have proliferated in various media since the 1950s, including the Ian Fleming novels, television, comics, film, games, and young adult and fan fiction (including slash fiction). The 007 saga presents an opportunity to re-examine available ways of conceiving the franchise, from transmedia storytelling to media mixing, and it emphasizes the importance of scholarly models that can account for a decentralized creative labor. Throughout the history of Bond fiction, authorized and unauthorized writers have generated what now amounts to a threaded storytelling experience with pleasures that overlap with -- but are distinct from -- those of centrally planned media phenomena, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Note: Admission by waitlist only. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate majors in Film and Media Studies will have priority. Required screenings.
Same as L53 Film 507
Credit 3 units.
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L53 Film 5510 Graduate Practicum in Film & Media Studies
The practicum in Film & Media Studies seeks to make our graduate students more competitive in the job market. It consists of professional experience that brings to bear academic knowledge and skills associated with the graduate study of moving image media (film, television, digital). The practicum may take a number of forms, but in every case, the experience must be planned in a way that contributes to the student's professional development. It might consist of work curating films for a screening or mini-festival accompanied by screening notes or other activities that enhance the academic value of the event. The student might organize a reading group or a scholarly symposium or lecture series to further the understanding of a particular aspect of the moving image on campus. The practicum may also consist of archival, or curatorial work in forms of the moving image at an archive, museum, or other non-profit organization (such as the St. Louis International Film Festival). The student might also pursue a film/media-centered oral history project or develop a film/media-centered blog or engage in other forms of writing that have a public presence. Students may initiate other projects, but any practicum requires a faculty mentor and in circumstances in which there is a collaborating organization, a letter of endorsement of the practicum from the student's on-site supervisor. Every student presents a written proposal/plan for any practicum to the DGS and to the faculty mentor/advisor. Both faculty must give permission to the plan and determine the appropriate number of credit hours (variable 1 to 3). Students may sign up for the practicum more than once to satisfy the 3 credits required in this area for the FMS master's degree; however, only one practicum should be pursued in a given semester. If there is a site supervisor, she/he must provide a letter upon completion of the practicum detailing the student's work and its quality. The student must provide a brief narrative (2 to 5 pages) detailing how the practicum served as a learning experience. The faculty advisor will award the grade for the practicum.
Same as L53 Film 510
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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