All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.

Film 201

Film Historiography
Instructor:  Mark Sandberg

The theoretical and methodological issues raised by the practice of film and media history are the focus of this seminar. Intended primarily for first-year Film and Media graduate students and students pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies, the seminar examines important trends in historiography in order to help students begin to ask interesting historical questions and determine a suitable research methodology to answer them. The seminar is structured around the study of exemplary moments of media transition and historical transparency: early cinema, transitional-era film in the 1910s, the transition to sound, early and late television, and the digital turn. In each case, the seminar asks students to consider the role of textual hermeneutics in film and media history.

The research projects for the course are intended to give students the chance to gain experience working with a variety of primary, archival, filmic, televisual, and digital resources. The choice of the research topic is open; it can engage with any historical period, any cultural setting, and any kind of primary source, but must tackle fundamental historiographical questions of continuity and change, of evidence and narrative. For students with ongoing, longer-term projects, the paper for this course must entail a new round of research. Students will present the results of their research in a mini-conference at the end of the seminar.

Required Texts:

Miriam Hansen. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Harvard University Press, 1991).
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California  Press, 2005).
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (MIT Press, 2003)
Course Reader

Requirements:

One short exhibition “ethnography” (1 page single-spaced)
One summary-reaction paper (1-2 pages)
Final conference presentation (15-20 mins.)
Final paper (20-25 pages)

Film 230

Production Seminar
Instructor: Jeffrey Skoller

This semester-long intensive covers the basic elements of digital filmmaking and is designed for graduate scholars and artists with varying or no experience in film/video production. The goal of the course is to enable students to film and edit their own productions and to gain a working overview of the digital film production process. The course also looks at ways of integrating film and video production into scholarly research (audio/visual data and cine-essay), or as a tool for personal expression and creative exploration (video installation, storytelling), as well as to develop skills to teach introductory video production.

Through a series of creative, thematically based exercises and the production of a final project, the course covers the use of digital-video cameras, sound, and lighting, as well as other formats for image capture such as still cameras, 16/8mm, and cell phones that can be used in a digital post-production environment. The class will explore practices of film/video editing – how to organize filmic materials emphasizing formal structure and various approaches to montage and continuity – while learning digital editing programs such as Final Cut Pro.

The weekly class will be structured around exercises produced by the class, hands-on technical workshops, film/video screenings, and presentations by occasional visiting artists and speakers. Required work will consist of a series creative exercises, a group project, and a final project which can be linked to projects for other courses in which you are enrolled.

Required Texts: Limited production equipment will be available for the course, but expect to pay a minimum of $100 for materials in addition to a required textbook.

Film 240

Topics in Film:  The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema
Instructor: Mary Ann Doane

An examination of the use of the close-up and scale in film and theory, from the “primitive” cinema to IMAX and from Münsterberg to Aumont and Deleuze.  Special attention to the way in which the close-up has been associated insistently with the face and its heightened cultural significance, with the advent of a “cinematic language,” and with questions of cinematic space and scale.

Required Texts: TBA

Film 240/German 265

Topics in Film:  The Essay Film
Instructor: Anton Kaes

This seminar explores the emergence and formal variety of the essay film, which has recently caught the attention of film scholars. A hybrid genre of non-narrative cinema, the essay film mixes documentary and experimental forms to “think through” philosophical, ethical, and film-theoretical issues with a high degree of self-reflexivity.  We will analyze representative essay films from the 1960s to the present by Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Gustav Deutsch, and Helke Sander, and bring these German works into dialogue with classic essay films by Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Guy Debord, et al.   Readings will include texts from phenomenology, semiotics, and critical theory, as well as current reflections on photography and new media.  All films will have English subtitles.

Required Texts: None