All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.

Film 200

Film Theory
Instructor: Linda Williams

This course offers an advanced introduction to the field of film and media theory. It is divided into three sections: 1) works of film theory focusing on questions of modernity, mass production, formalism and realism; 2) the seventies’ era of “grand theory” focusing on questions of  semiotics, psychoanalysis and sexual difference; 3) recent theories of visual media, television and “new media.”  Although we will read these works in roughly chronological order, we will not assume a teleology of development from more “primitive” to “advanced” and some readings on new media will be paired with those of older media.  Throughout the course we will attempt to place theorists in conversation with one another about crucial questions of moving-image media  and to place ourselves in conversation with them.

Requirements: Full attendance and helpful contribution to both formal and informal discussions along with short summary-reaction papers posted to the class and developed in class (15%); a short review of a film, television series, recent DVD release, book or journal (15%); 20-page seminar paper on a topic related to film theory (50%, prospectus and bibliography due November 17); participation in final conference (20%).

Screenings  Monday 12-2 Seminar Wed 10-11 in 226 Dwinelle.

Recommended Screenings at PFA are listed in syllabus. A PFA Cal Pass, offers unlimited attendance for $15 per semester, a true bargain!

Required Texts (available in book store and on reserve in Rhetoric-Film Library):

• André  Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berke­ley: U of California Press,  1967).
• Leo Braudy and Marshal Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Michel Chion, Audio-Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1I: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
• Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995)
• Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cine­ma, trans. Celia Britton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
• Course Book Reader (R)–available first week at Replica Copy, 2140 Oxford

Film 203

Film & Media Proseminar
Instructors: Kristen Whissel

This seminar will address matters related to professionalization within the discipline of Film and Media in particular and the Humanities in general as well as the degree requirements for the Ph.D. in Film & Media. Each week, we will meet to discuss a specific topic, which will include: the Qualifying Exam; QE fields and lists; writing the dissertation prospectus; researching and writing the dissertation; publishing articles in peer reviewed journals; the job market; writing job application letters; the job interview and campus visit; turning your dissertation into a book; university presses and how to approach university press editors (and what they are looking for); and “what can I do now to help ensure I get tenure later?” Classes will be organized around presentations and workshops.

Film 240.001

Special Topics in Film:  Orienting Europe
(Cross listed with German 268)
Instructor: Deniz Göktürk

This seminar will collaboratively analyze symbolic constructions of Europe in moving images from Lumière to YouTube and installations of video art. Our focus will be on spectatorship, formation of publics, and practices of orientation. We will explore ways of imagining Europe as a polyphonic space shaped by migration and shifting border zones, including perspectives from the Middle East, North Africa and former socialist countries. Textual analysis will be complemented with contextualizing research on sites of participation and networks of circulation. Funding schemes for multinational co-productions in cinema, film festivals, biennials, the Eurovision song contest, or the European Capital of Culture Program will yield case studies for debates on tourism, heritage preservation, urban restructuring, and global city projects. Keystone texts on modernity, media, and memory will help us conceptualize the European imaginary from a variety of angles. Special interests and language skills that participants bring to the seminar will be put to use in expanding our archive.

Film 240.002

Special Topics in Film: Cinema and the Politics of Crisis
Instructor: Tony Kaes

The seminar investigates German cinema of the late Weimar Republic and its complex relationship to the growing social and political unrest of the period. Special attention will be paid to the transition from silent cinema to sound after 1929 and the transition from a democratic to a fascist system after 1933. We will analyze selected films between 1929, the year of the stock market crash, and 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics and Hitler’s greatest triumph. Our theoretical guide will be the political, economic, and cultural writings of the Frankfurt School during that time period. Larger questions will include the tension between aesthetics and politics, the role of the intellectual, and the very concept of crisis. Films by Bert Brecht, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Max Ophüls, and Leni Riefenstahl, among others. Texts by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, et al.

Film 240.003

Special Topics in Film: State of the Art Film: 1963
(Cross listed with English 203, sec 1)
Instructor:  D.A. Miller

The course centers on the conception and practice of the so-called international art film around 1963.  Without making a fetish of the date, it may be agreed that 1963 was a remarkable year: for quality of product, for the upsurge in points of distribution, and for the diversity of cinematic modernisms on offer.   To stay within this moment’s own canon (which has not entirely remained in our own), our primary object of study will be the films on Cahiers du cinéma‘s top-ten list for 1963, reproduced below:

1. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel)
4. Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier)
5. The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (Robert Bresson)
6. Muriel (Alain Resnais)
7. The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
8. Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard)
9. Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi)
10. 8½ (Federico Fellini)

To these we will add, also from 1963, The Leopard (Luchino Visconti), The Silence (Ingmar Bergman), and High and Low (Akira Kurosawa).