Session D: July 6 – August 13

All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.

R1A.002

The Craft of Writing – Film Focus
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement).
TuWTh: 2:30pm – 5pm, 205 Dwinelle (Lecture)
Tu: 6pm – 8:30pm, 79 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Vaccaro, Justin

The Spy Film – espionage, the history of cinema, and the critique of the nation.

“Secret services are the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”   John Le Carré

What does the spy film tell us about the modern nation state? What can we learn about the importance of truth and lies in these films and thus in the worlds they come from? Are spies a good thing? A necessary evil? Or are they a contradiction eating away at the heart of the nation? Are spies in fact all of these things? Though often thought of as pure fantasy, some the greatest spy films are in fact critiques of their historical reality and can provide us with valuable insights into the nature of this modern world in which we live.

This course is designed to introduce students to college level analytical writing, reading and viewing. We will learn how to write cogently and persuasively by critically engaging various texts – films, essays, short stories – and by constructing strong interpretative arguments about them. Though the spy film is our focus, we will not being looking at any James Bond films, but we will see in the 1928 silent film Spione (Spies) that many of the elements for the Bond and other spy films were already in place even before the coming of sound. Starting with Spione we will move chronologically through the history of the spy film, understanding it as an ever evolving genre that is always building off of and commenting on what has come before. In the process we will also examine the history of cinema such as the arrival of sound and then of color, the impact of television and the changing nature and influence of Hollywood. And the films we watch will take on a variety forms – action film, taunt thriller, psychedelic trip and even a dark comedy. Moreover, we will look at how the spy film responds to its historical moment and see not only how the nature of espionage changes but also our representations and evaluations of it as well. Whether  realistic or absurd, self-reflexive or tragic, ironic or earnest we will see that all these films critique the culture of secrecy and the political ideologies that support it.  We will enrich and tease out these critiques with the help of various texts in political theory and philosophy and through comparisons with literary representations of espionage.

R1B.002

The Craft of Writing – Film Focus
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement).
MWF: 1pm – 3:30pm, 242 Dwinelle (Lecture)
M: 5p – 7:30pm, 79 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Rosario, J Andre

25A.001

The History of Silent Film
(This course fulfills the film major lower division silent film history requirement.)
MWF: 9am – 11:30am, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)
M: 11:30am – 2pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Goetz, Chris

Film 25A is a rigorous introduction to the study of silent cinema, which includes a consideration of cinema’s pre-history as well as early experiments with the medium.  The study is founded on an interrogation of aesthetics, narrative modes, notions of spectatorship, the critical construction of genres, the history of technology and invention, fantasy, and identity (race, nation, gender).  The course is an “introduction” because of the breadth of both its historical window (from the late 1800s to the early 1930s) and the range of approaches to the study of film mentioned above.  But it has been called an “advanced” introduction because of the difficulty of some of the texts considered, and the brisk pace with which our thinking will have to transition to cover the material (the shift is made all the more taxing by the abbreviated summer semester).  Throughout we will be concerned with how film form is used to articulate narrative, psychological and ideological concerns—the course’s in-depth discussions of sequences from our screenings emphasize nascent techniques that can be seen as foundational to the popular cinema most recognize today.

100.001

History of Film Theory
(This course fulfills the upper division film theory requirement.)
TuWTh: 4:30pm – 7pm, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)
Tu: 2pm – 4:30pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Levin, Erica

How has cinematic form and pleasure been theorized over the course of the past century? What did early fascinated viewers make of their cinematic experiences? Why did debates about film form begin to take on political or even moral valences? How did the discourse around film change once theorists began to compare cinema to language? Why did this lead some people to rethink the pleasures offered up by film? How in our own moment are we to make sense of the significant changes occurring both in film production and distribution? These are some of the key questions this course will address. Texts from the history of film theory will be paired with weekly film screenings. Students will engage these texts and the ideas they propose closely; as well as have many opportunities to work through their own theoretically informed readings of individual films.

Required Texts:
Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, Edited by Marc Furstenau
(Routledge, 2010)

108.002

Special Topics in Film Genre: “Horror: The Zombie Film”
MWF: 2pm – 4:30pm, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)
M: 4:30pm – 7pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Jones, Eileen

In this course we will draw on the extensive scholarship considering the figure of the zombie in political, cultural, and philosophical terms in order to examine three phases of the zombie figure in horror film in their historical contexts. First, classical Hollywood horror films inspired by the religious and cultural phenomenon of the Haitian voodoo zombie, such as White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie. Second, the zombie redefined by filmmaker George A. Romero in his seminal 1960s-‘70s trilogy Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead/Day of the Dead. And third, the post-Romero zombie figure of increasingly parodic excess (Dead-Alive, Shaun of the Dead, and recent popular novels optioned for film adaptation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Breathers: A Love Story), as well as the significant genre revisionism involved in recent films such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, its sequel 28 Weeks Later, remakes of Romero’s zombie films, and the popular AMC television series, The Walking Dead.

128.001

Documentary
(This course fullfills the film major upper division documentary requirement.)
TuWF: 11:30am – 2pm, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)
Th: 11:30am – 2pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)
Instructor: Malkowski, Jen

Of all the arts, cinema has had the greatest mandate to “represent reality,” the obligations of which have rested heavily on its documentary branch.  Confronting this task – at once urgent and impossible – documentarians have produced some of the most complex and fascinating works in film history.  This course will examine how they have done so, including their challenges to the notion that film can give us access to “reality.”  While we’ll cover the full range of documentary history, stretching back to the 1890s with the earliest actualities, the course will be structured by thematic units instead of chronology.  These units will include: documentary and the everyday, observational documentary, ethnography, autobiographical documentary, documentary representations of the past.  Analyzing the current state of documentary and questioning its future paths will be a particular focus, as the past few decades have brought enormous changes in documentary production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as a formidable nemesis (in the eyes of many documentary makers and scholars): reality television.  Throughout the course, we will interrogate the definition and boundaries of the documentary mode, the unique ethical considerations of doing documentary work, and the social, cultural, and technological factors that shape documentary’s history and current practice.