All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.

Film R1A.001

The Craft of Writing:  “Historicizing the Contemporary: Technology and Mass Culture at the Turns
of the Century”
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Emily Carpenter

This course examines the distinction between “old” and “new” media by offering an introduction to critical media history that focuses on two periods: 1880-1910 and 1980-2010.  The first phase of course materials describes the discourses that surround the communication and transportation technologies that birthed modern mass culture around the turn of the 20th century.  The second phase of course materials investigates the emergence of technologies and media platforms that shape the contemporary media landscape, from cybernetics to social networking.  Students will acquire the historical knowledge and critical vocabulary to examine mass cultural texts across a variety of media.  Writing assignments will prepare students to make clear and compelling arguments about everything from wax museums to reality TV, illustrated magazines to YouTube mash-ups.

Readings may include:
Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema
Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, eds. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture

Screenings may include:
The Lonely Villa (Griffith, 1909)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
Hackers (Softley, 1995)
The Social Network (Fincher, 2010)

Film R1A.003

The Craft of Writing:  “Historicizing the Contemporary: Technology and Mass Culture at the Turns
of the Century”
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Emily Carpenter

This course examines the distinction between “old” and “new” media by offering an introduction to critical media history that focuses on two periods: 1880-1910 and 1980-2010.  The first phase of course materials describes the discourses that surround the communication and transportation technologies that birthed modern mass culture around the turn of the 20th century.  The second phase of course materials investigates the emergence of technologies and media platforms that shape the contemporary media landscape, from cybernetics to social networking.  Students will acquire the historical knowledge and critical vocabulary to examine mass cultural texts across a variety of media.  Writing assignments will prepare students to make clear and compelling arguments about everything from wax museums to reality TV, illustrated magazines to YouTube mash-ups.

Readings may include:
Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema
Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, eds. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture

Screenings may include:
The Lonely Villa (Griffith, 1909)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
Hackers (Softley, 1995)
The Social Network (Fincher, 2010)

 

Film R1B.001

The Craft of Writing:  Explorations of Space and Time in Cinema
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Munira Lokhandwala

The emergence of the cinema in the late 19th century coincided with the invention and development of several technologies of speed and mass reproduction (i.e. railroads, telegraphs, industrial production) that irrecoverably changed the way that that our bodies experienced time and space. A fascination with these new, visceral experiences of space and time have preoccupied cinema from its inception. The medium of film is uniquely capable of collapsing temporal and spatial categories, producing images that can activate a sense of multi-locality and timelessness at once. Ranging from comedy and documentary to science-fiction and horror, the literary, filmic and audio texts we will examine in this course call attention to the role of cinema in re-configuring and re-imagining our notions of space and time.

This course is designed as an immersive experience in writing successful college-level academic essays.  Through close reading, critical thinking, and argumentative writing, as well as extensive peer commentary and revision, students will learn to make intellectual arguments about texts that are thoughtful and persuasive, thorough and concise.  Our main focus this semester is on writing research papers.  We will learn how to conduct research into primary and secondary materials at the library, and how to integrate our findings into well-written analytical essays.

Required Text:  TBA

Film R1B.002

The Craft of Writing:  Surveillance in Literature and Film
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Jonathan Haynes

This course is designed as an immersive experience in writing successful college-level academic essays.  Through close reading, critical thinking, and argumentative writing, as well as extensive peer commentary and revision, we will learn to make intellectual arguments about texts that are thoughtful and persuasive, thorough and concise. We will also learn research strategies, including how to use primary materials to generate original and compelling thesis statements.

In this section, we will study the cinema and literature of surveillance, examining “surveillance” as both a cultural phenomenon (a longstanding subject of public debate, paranoia, and fascination) and as an aesthetic. We will read selections from Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Baudrillard, and Valentin Groeber, and watch films including M (Lang 1933), Caché (Haneke 2005), Family Viewing (Egoyan 1988), Rear Window (Hitchcock 1954), Blow Up (Antonioni 1966), and Zodiac (Fincher 2007).

Required Texts:  David Rosenwasser, Writing Analytically (6th Edition); Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly; and Course Reader, available at Metro Publishing (2440 Bancroft @ Sather Lane)

Film R1B.003

The Craft of Writing:  TBA
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Norman Gendelman

This course is designed to train students in the skills of college-level academic research and writing. In effort to particularize this aim, our course will focus on a set of scholarly paradigms and texts related to the contemporary television drama. Through close analysis, as well as extensive peer commentary and rewriting, students will learn to make sophisticated arguments about a number of written and visual materials. Students will learn to critically interrogate and research the objects and themes that set the foundation for Television discourse. And while the syllabus offers a mere sampling of some of the major discourses about Television drama, students will have an opportunity to pursue their own interests in a final research project of their own design at the end of the semester. (The syllabus is always subject to change at the instructors’ discretion to accommodate the needs of the class.)

Required Text:  TBA

Film R1B.005

The Craft of Writing:  “Regarding Television”
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement.)
Instructor:  Emily Carpenter

This course offers students an introduction to the history and criticism of television, from its emergence as a medium to its convergence with other programming platforms in the contemporary media landscape.  Course materials will examine television’s role in articulating historical shifts in the relationship between public and private space and the medium’s relationship to mainstream and countercultural political movements.  Writing assignments will prepare students to make clear and compelling arguments about how television programs make claims about race, class, gender and sexuality; students will design personalized research programs culminating in self-directed projects that investigate a television series of their choice.

Readings may include:
Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion
Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson, Eds. Teen TV: Genre, Consumption, Identity
Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism
Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture
Sasha Torres, Ed. Living Color: Race and Television in the United States

Film 25B

History of Film: Sound Era
Instructor:  Eileen Jones

In this introductory survey course we will examine the history of cinema from the silent-to-sound revolution of the late 1920′s through the international development of film as a transformative technology, art form, and commercial medium up to the present time.  Drawing from Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Film History:  An Introduction as well as the scholarship of such film historians/theorists as Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, Miriam Hansen, John Belton, Hamid Naficy, Thomas Elsaesser, Henry Jenkins, and others, we will be discussing the way certain landmark short and feature films reflected social, political, and ideological changes through the decades.  The objectives of this course are to:

1. Familiarize the students with the major technological and aesthetic innovations of the past 80 years which have given rise to the cinema as we know it today;
2. Foster students’ awareness of the economic, social and political contexts in which sound cinema developed and the impact which cinema had, in turn, on nations, cultures, and historical events; and
3. Give students a clear sense of the major moments in sound cinema (including classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema, experimental and avant-garde cinema, Italian Neo-Realism, French Poetic Realism and New Wave, Third World Cinema, Political Cinema of the 1960s-’70s, and film in the era of global multimedia) and how those movements intertwined with critical, theoretical, and popular responses to the medium.

Required Text:  David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film History:  An Introduction, 3rd Edition (MacGraw-Hill, 2009).  Any additional readings will be posted on bSpace and/or handed out in class.

Film 26

Moving Image Media
Instructor:  Natalie Zimmerman

The objective of this class is to provide a basic technical foundation for digital video film production while emphasizing the techniques and languages of creative moving image media from traditional story genres to more contemporary experimental forms. Training will move from pre-production-scripting and storyboarding, through production, including image capture, lighting and sound recording, to post-production with non-linear digital editing programs such as Final Cut Pro and editing strategies and aesthetics. The course will consist of lectures/screenings, discussion/critique, visiting artists, and production workshops in which students produce a series of exercises and a final project.

Required Text:  TBA

Film 50

Introduction to Film for Non-Majors
Instructor:  Marilyn Fabe

Film 50 is an introductory course designed for non-majors, members of the Berkeley community, and students considering the film major at Berkeley who want to explore the history and aesthetics of the film medium. The films chosen for screening illustrate distinctive directorial styles, film genres and/or national cinema styles. By concentrating on the historical development of filmic mise-en-scene, the photographic image, editing, cinematography, and the relation of sound to the image, students learn to view film as a complex picture language and to understand how the combination of sound and image articulate film’s narrative, psychological, social and ideological purposes. This year’s structuring theme will be Film and the Other Arts. The films chosen for screening will highlight a central question about the nature of film as an art: Is film best understood as a synthesis of all the other arts (music, dance, literature, architecture, theater, sculpture, painting, photography) or should it be thought of as separate art unto itself, with its own unique and specific possibilities?

Lectures and screenings will take place at the Pacific Film Archive Theater at Bancroft and Bowditch on Wednesday afternoons from 3-6. Sections meet on Thursdays and Fridays.

Required Text:  David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction 9th Edition; Course Reader (availability TBA)

Film 108.001

Film Genre:  Noir
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Genre requirement.)
Instructor:  Anton Kaes

This course focuses on classics of American film noir made by German filmmakers in Hollywood who were refugees from Nazi persecution.  Their “dark” films about urban crime and moral ambiguity introduced a creative alternative to Hollywood’s typical optimism, idealism and heroism.  Stylistically indebted to German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, film noir also conveyed the prevailing mood of dislocation, disillusionment, and alienation at the time.  The course will focus on the modernist forms and philosophical undercurrents of these films, and place them within larger political and cultural discourses of 1940s America.  We will analyze Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard; Fritz Lang’s Fury, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat; Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Phantom Lady; Ludwig Maté’s D.O.A.; Edgar Ulmer’s Detour; and Fred Zinneman’s Act of Violence.  In addition, we will discuss clips from other masterworks of the genre (Maltese Falcon, Asphalt Jungle, Out of the Past, Naked City, Gilda, et al.) for comparison.

Required Text:  None

Film 108.002

Film Genre:  The Woman’s Film
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Genre requirement.)
Instructor:  Kristen Whissel

This course will focus on the “woman’s film” — a Hollywood genre produced from the silent era until today.  Made for, about, and sometimes by women, such films strongly address a presumed “female” audience and as such have performed an important role in society’s ordering of sexual difference.  Beginning with the silent era’s “Flapper film” and ending with contemporary women’s independent cinema, this course analyzes the prevailing narrative paradigms, recurring figures and characterizations, as well as the thematic obsessions that overtly mark the woman’s film.  Each week we will analyze a specific issue or “subgenre” (such as the gothic film and the maternal or paternal melodrama) associated with the woman’s film, from the problem of domesticity to paranoia and the gothic film to cross-dressing and identity.  Directors will include Dorothy Arzner, Douglas Sirk, and Sally Potter, amongst others.  Readings will focus on the feminist scholarship written around questions of spectatorship, genre, representation, sexuality, race, class and identity in the woman’s film.

Required Text:  None

Film 108.003

Film Genre:  New Wave Cinema in Japan
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Genre requirement.)
Instructor:  Michael Raine

This course surveys the rise and fall of alternatives within and to studio cinema in Japan between the 1950s and the 1970s. The concept of a “new wave” is notoriously imprecise: rather than shared stylistic attributes or political programs, this course encompasses both the “cinema of high economic growth” and the “alternative” films that were shaped by that culture even as they rejected it. The films are best understood as linked in a loose “culture of authenticity” that opposed the jokey displacement of foreign forms in the studio cinema’s “culture of the copy.” Topics include the Nikkatsu and Shochiku new waves, union-based oppositional cinema, experimental film-making, radical documentary, auteur cinema, the Shochiku new wave, Toho musicals, experimental theatre, the Shinjuku and Shibuya film-theatre subcultures, and the institutional roles of the Sogetsu Art Center and the Art Theatre Guild.

Required Text: TBA

Film 108.004

Film Genre:  American Films of the 1950′s
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Genre requirement.)
Instructor:  Russell Merritt

In some sense, this course will be a survey.  We will study a cross-section of the most famous ‘50s genres including the musical, the western, sci-fi, the crime film, and domestic melodrama.  The course will also be interested in the decade’s major directors:  Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Mann, Douglas Sirk, and – inevitably — Hitchcock.  However, the films have been chosen not on the basis of their critical acclaim or box office popularity, but for their more allusive ability to interpret hidden tensions, slippages, and incongruities lurking behind the signature themes of the decade.  The famous 50s icons and motifs have long been fixed:  rock ‘n roll, Cold War paranoia, conformity, TV, mass production, Marilyn Monroe, suburbia, and flying saucers.  We will be interested less in how movies perpetuated all that than in how, even as a mass entertainment, they functioned as critical and surprisingly unpredictable probes into a culture of affluence, sexual confusion, and drift.

We will study too the way narrative cinema was perceived and was being used at the time.  In order to understand the broad range of contexts movies were caught in – cultural metaphor, dream factory, and a mass medium in competition with TV, theater and literature  –

Required Text:  We will read four ‘50s novels:  Nabokov’s Lolita, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint. Other readings will be anthologized in a course reader.

Film 108.005

Film Genre:  Film on Film on Novel on Film
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Genre requirement.)
Instructor:  Gavriel Moses

A course about self-reflexive cinema and the role of film-themes and film-form in the novel. The course examines a wide array of literary writing which is informed by film-mimetics and by the treatment of film as subject matter.  First practiced by the Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello–”Shoot” (1914)–this narrative genre was subsequently practiced by a wide range of writers. Such novels will be juxtaposed to films that stress their own status as cinematic artifacts. Films and Novels will thus be studied in the context of each other and in the light of major film theories (Eisenstein, Arnheim, Bazin, Metz, as well as post-classical theories).

Film 128

Documentary Film
(Replaces Film 28A. This course fulfills the Film Major Documentary requirement.)
Instructor:  Jeffrey Skoller

This course surveys the history, theory and practice of the film/TV genre called Documentary. We will attempt to explore the varied approaches to “non-fiction” film that fall under this rubric. We not only ask what Documentary film is, but what we, as viewers want from Documentary films that is different from other film genres.  We examine the major modes of documentary filmmaking including cinema verite, direct cinema, investigative documentary, ethnographic film, agit-prop and activist media, autobiography and the personal essay as well as recent post-modern forms that question relationships between fact and fiction such as the docudrama, the archival film, cine-recreations and “mockumentary.” We will examine the “reality effects” of these works through formal analysis focusing on their narrative structures and the ways in which they make meaning. Through this, we explore some of the theoretical discourses and questions that constantly surround this most philosophical of film genres. We will ask: How do these films shape notions of truth, reality and personal experience? What are the ethics and politics of representation and who speaks for whom when we watch a documentary?  What do documentaries make visible or conceal? What, if anything, constitutes objectivity? And by the way, just what is a document anyway? Course work will include short response papers, a midterm, and a final paper or project.

Required Text:  TBA

Film 140.001

Special Topics:  Sound
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  Mark Berger

This course will explore the nature, evolution, use, and abuse of sound in cinema.   From the first silent films, which weren’t presented in silence at all, to current ride films, the relation between sound and image will be analyzed in detail.  While there is a high degree of visual sophistication in audiences and academic analysis, there is an almost equal naiveté when it comes to sound.  Starting with the physics of sound, the neurophysiology of hearing, and how our perception influences our emotional reactions, we will consider the three main categories of film sound – dialogue, music, effects – from the perspectives of the writer, the director, and the audience, looking at the artistic and technical factors that guide and constrain the creative process, as well as how changes in the technology of presentation have affected audience response.  Examples will be shown from foreign and domestic feature, documentary, and animated films.   Depending on schedules, there will be several guest lectures by directors and editors currently working on the soundtracks of their films.  At the end of the course, students should be able to bring an increased sophistication and depth to their understanding of how sound contributes to (or diminishes!) the filmic experience.

Requirements:  Attendance in class lectures and film screenings is mandatory.  Midterm exam, final exam, 2 quizzes, several short analyses of assigned films, and small group creation and presentation of audio scenes illustrating concepts covered in class.

Required Text:  Readings distributed in class.

Film 140.002

Special Topics:  American National Identity in Film
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  Eileen Jones

Typical approaches to a course topic such as this one would include a cultural studies approach, examining American films as ideological texts with representational systems for depicting, among other things, race, class, gender and sexuality, representational systems that can be decoded by the analytical spectator. Or a historical approach, studying American films as sociological and cultural artifacts that both reflect and shape public attitudes toward key events and eras in American history. While not rejecting either of these approaches—we will draw on both—in this course, we will emphasize the development of certain film genres in response to aspects of American life, in the philosophical terms set out by Stanley Cavell:

“…The members of a genre share the inheritence of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition, and…each member of such a genre represents a study of these conditions…”

For Cavell, the inheritence of a genre includes a complex weave of historical and aesthetic antecedents which gives rise to the necessity of “study,” of collective popular cogitation on a perplexity, in the form of a genre. We will look at examples from some uniquely American genres, including the Western, the gangster film, the screwball comedy, film noir, and the zombie film, in this light. We will also consider the films of certain directors, often working within genres, who were or are clearly invested in representing, examining, and/or mythologizing certain relationships between American geography and “the American character,” between physical environment and social configuration, such as John Ford, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Stanley Kubrick, George Romero, and the Coen Brothers.

Film 151.001

Auteur Theory:  Howard Hawks
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Auteur requirement.)
Instructor:  Marilyn Fabe

The prolific American film producer/director Howard Hawks made highly entertaining, commercially successful films in nearly every genre: the gangster film (Scarface); the screwball comedy (Twentieth Century; Bringing Up Baby); the Western (Red River; Rio Bravo); the science fiction film (The Thing); the adventure drama (Only Angels Have Wings; Dawn Patrol; To Have and Have Not); the film noir (The Big Sleep); and even the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).  Despite his genre hopping and studio hopping, Hawks is, nevertheless, considered an important American auteur with a consistent style, vision and worldview. Through the screening and close analysis of 14 films, we will consider: What makes a film quintessentially Hawksian?

In order to assess the richness and complexity of Hawks’ cinema we will study it from a number of critical perspectives, including: (1) The context of auteur theory; What defines an auteur, and how does Howard Hawks fit the description? (2) The relation of Hawks’ works to the classical Hollywood film and the ideological assumptions that structure it. (3) Feminist writings on the Hawksian woman and the function of sex-role reversals in so many of his films. (4) Analyses of the sexual politics in the homosocial world of the all male group in Hawks’ films.

This course is being taught in conjunction with the Pacific Film Archive’s Howard Hawks Retrospective. Screening will take place Tuesday evening at the Pacific Film Archive Theater where students will have the privilege of seeing Howard Hawks’ films in 35mm archival prints. The screenings are free for those enrolled in the course.

Required Texts:  Jim Hillier and Peter Wollen, eds., Howard Hawks: American Artist, British Film Institute; Robin Wood, Howard Hawks, Wayne State University Press; and Course Reader (availability TBA)

Film 151.002

Auteur Theory:  “Documentary” Visions: Werner Herzog and Errol Morris
(This course fulfills the Film Major Upper Division Auteur requirement.)
Instructor:  Linda Williams

Werner Herzog may be best known for his fictional feature films but he has always made non-fiction films right alongside his fictions. Arguably, his non-fiction films constitute his best work. Errol Morris is a non-fiction filmmaker who challenged documentary orthodoxy by staging re-enactments and, like Hergoz, blurred the lines between fact and fiction. This course studies and compares the careers of these two distinctive authors. Although authorship is usually discussed in relation to filmmakers who make a distinctive mark in the realm of fiction, we will be interested in the non-fictions of these two great directors who have so importantly re-invented the genre they refuse to call “documentary.” The influence of Herzog on Morris is well-known. Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Morris ever finished a film and did so when Morris finished Gates of Heaven. Less well-recognized is the subsequent influence of Morris on Herzog, as evident in Herzog’s most recent Into the Abyss. We will begin by comparing two “pinnacle” films of both directors and then dig into selected films of first Herzog and then Morris. We will explore the romantic landscapes of Herzog in relation to what could be called the “face/scapes” of Morris. Together Herzog and Morris will offer important points of comparison in the way non-fiction films seek to portray many different qualities and kinds of  “truth.”

Required Texts:

Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London and New York: Wallflower Press 2007)
Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog (New York: Faber and Faber 2002)
Livia Bloom, Errol Morris Interviews (Jackson Miss: Mississippi University Press, 2010)
Course Reader from Copy/Replica, 2140 Oxford

Film 160.002

National Cinema:  Cinema in Japan:  Art and Commerce in a Transnational Medium
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  Michael Raine

This course surveys Japanese cinema from its prehistory to the work of contemporary transnational auteurs. We will focus on both Japan and the cinema: each week will present a specific historical context and a particular disciplinary question brought into focus by that week’s films. For example we will consider the “vernacular modernist” argument as applied to the burgeoning mass culture of 1930s Japan; ideas of intertextuality and the connections between literature, theatre, popular music, and prewar film; the war film and theories of propaganda; genre theory and postwar melodrama; neoformalist and cultural studies of film, etc. We will of course pay attention to geniuses of Japanese cinema such as Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa, but we will also study film in relation to broader contexts, such as the prewar “culture of the sound image” and the postwar period of “high economic growth.” We will also take account of particular movements within cinema itself, such as the “new wave” and the turn to “political modernism” in the 1960s. All readings on the course are in English; no Japanese is required.

Required Text:  TBA

Film 180A

Screenwriting
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  J. Mira Kopell

Explores the art and craft of writing a feature length, narrative screenplay.  Participants present three story ideas to the class, develop one concept into a detailed treatment and write the first act of the script in professional screenplay form.  Focus is on rewriting, with regular presentations of outlines and scripts to fellow writers.  Emphasis on story structure, character development and screenplay form.  Includes in-class writing exercises.

Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required.  This class is open to juniors and seniors.  Preference is given to Film & Media majors, but instructor will try to accommodate other majors.  Interested students should attend the first class session.

Required Text:  The Essentials of Screenwriting:  The Art Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing, by Richard Walter (Plume June 29, 2010); The Hollywood Standard, by Christopher Riley (Michael Wiese Productions August 1, 2009); and Four Screenplays:  Studies in the American Screenplay, by Syd Field (Delta August 1, 1994).

Film C185

Digital Video:  Focus on the Narrative Short
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  J. Mira Kopell

This hands-on course explores the process of making narrative shorts using digital video production.  Students will write, storyboard, shoot and edit three to four short films (1-10 minutes).  Lecture topics include how to write an effective short script; storyboarding; working with the digital video camera; directing actors and camera; continuity and coverage; composition; lighting; sound design; fundamentals of video editing and editing esthetics.  Class members work outside of class in assigned “crews” to shoot projects and edit in the media lab outside of class as well.  Dailies and cuts are screened in class and critiqued by both the instructor and fellow filmmakers.  Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required.  This class is open to juniors and seniors.  Preference is given to Film & Media and Art Practice majors, but instructor will try to accommodate students with other majors as well.  Interested students should attend the first class session.

Required Text:  Film Directing Shot by Shot:  Visualizing from Concept to Screen, by Steven Katz (Michael Wiese August 14, 1991); Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect, Third Edition, by Claudia Johnson (Focal Press September 14, 2009)

Film C187

Advanced Digital Video
(This course may be used as an elective for the film major.)
Instructor:  Gavriel Moses

Course Format:  Nine hours of studio/colloquia per week.

NB: Students wishing to take the course this Spring should pre-enroll online.

This advanced studio course (very demanding and very labor intensive) is designed for students who have mastered basic skills and concepts involved in digital video production as taught in FS26 and FS185, and for those who are interested in further investigating critical, theoretical, and creative topics in digital video production.

This semester the course will address the full production process of a short narrative film: from idea, to narrative premise, to treatment, to pre-production, to casting, to shooting-script, to directing the film, to crewing for each other, to post-production and, finally, to exhibition.

Narrative should be understood, for the purposes of this class, in a broad sense. The final result (your film) can be, if not mainstream, narrative – metanarrative – antinarrative – deconarrative – conceptnarrative – subvertgenrenarrative, and so on. For all of these alternatives to work, however, we must be clear about what narrative is assumed to be in its conventional form by our culture[s].  We will therefore look first of all, and very carefully, at the conventions and techniques of story development, at the basics clear communication, and the elements of an engaging execution.  We will do this before we explore the tangents that test the limits and contradictions of the shared traditional conventions of classic narrative cinema.

We will focus, of course, on the craft.  But just as much as technique, the course is built on the assumption that what needs to be at the core of good filmmaking is a distinct and individual voice that knows what it is about.  We will thus explore what you need to master if you are to communicate your ideas, what it is that constitutes meaning , and how much all of this depends on knowing who you are.  This class takes it for granted that the most important thing a filmmaker needs to learn from the outset (over and above technique) is what s/he is going to put into the film.  Of course, you will need to master further the nuts & bolts of the filmmaking process. Yet we will keep our focus on the fact that the most difficult task for a filmmaker is to have something to say that is worth saying.  Prerequisites: Completed 185 with a grade of A- or better, consent of instructor, and a great deal of independence and initiative.  Students who have not taken FS185, and who have not done equivalent work, are expected to catch up, when relevant, on the reading and production exercises that were assigned to that course.  FOR MORE INFORMATION:  http://studio.berkeley.edu/coursework/moses/courses/FS187SP12/

Film 197A

Field Study at the Pacific Film Archive
Tu: 10:00am – 11:00am, PFA Library in the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave
Instructor:  Nancy Goldman

Mandatory group meetings on Tuesdays at the PFA Library. Students must schedule three hours of fieldwork per week in addition to the group meetings.

Prerequisites: Declared film majors with at least 60 semester units completed.

Interning at the Pacific Film Archive Library and Film Study Center. Interns will learn about research strategies and film reference resources by attending lectures, writing a subject bibliography, and working in the PFA Library. Interns will get a thorough orientation to the PFA Library through introductory lectures and training sessions. Then, for 3 hours per week throughout the semester, they will help organize materials for inclusion in the PFA Library’s clippings files. Interns will gain experience in library organization and film bibliography, as well as a broad knowledge of the kinds of film reviews and criticism found in a variety of sources. For more information, please call Nancy Goldman at 642-0366.

Film 197B

Independent Studies/Field Study for Majors
Instructor:  Marilyn Fabe

Offsite course: Film Majors Only. See Undergraduate Advisor for details.

Film 197C

Film Curating Internship
Th: 4pm – 5:30pm, Pacific Film Archive
Instructor:  Kathy Geritz

Meet in PFA’s Research Screening Room at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave.

Prerequisites: Declared film majors with at least 60 semester units completed; must have completed Avant Garde Film 28B. Professor approval required; enrollment limited.

Experience “behind-the-scenes” at PFA!  Interns will learn about film curating through creating a program of works by Bay Area film students to present at PFA the following Fall semester. Students will solicit films and videos, preview, and make a final selection as a group. Students will write short anlayses of local film exhibition programs and will do projects related to PFA’s ongoing exhibition program.