Session D: July 5-August 12, 2012

All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.

R1B.002

The Craft of Writing – Film Focus
(Satisfies reading and composition requirement).
TuWTh 1130a-200p  234 Dwinelle
Tu 500p-730p  156 Dwinelle (screening)

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, you will learn to make intellectual arguments about texts that are thoughtful and persuasive, thorough and concise. This semester, we’ll focus on research. You’ll learn how to find primary and secondary materials at the library, and how to integrate your “evidence” into well-written analytical essays.

We expect to “evidence” at a crime scene. But in the five films we’ll consult  this summer, the investigation of who did what to whom is always partly a nightmare or hallucination. The scene of the crime expands to take in more victims, more culprits, and more back story. These movies aren’t detective thrillers, exactly, but each one poses a  disturbing riddle. What’s wrong with The Wrong Man (more to the point: what’s wrong with his wife)? Who killed Sloan in the kitchen? What did happen on the Cahulawassee River? Did I hear a shot or a blow out? Who or what was the Zodiac killer? While following our five, vexed protagonists down the rabbit hole of suspicion and paranoia, we’ll raise our own questions about cinema aesthetics and their relation to late twentieth century American history. If, as Richard Hofstadter once claimed, there is a “paranoid style” to American politics, in what ways has the popular cinema incorporated this style? And is it possible – as Michael Rogin and Brian De Palma posit – that history itself is plagiarizing the paranoid styles of Hollywood movies?

Films: The Wrong Man (Hitchcock 1956), Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller 1964), Deliverance (John Boorman 1972), Blow Out (De Palma 1981), Zodiac (Fincher 2007)

25B.001

The History of Sound Film
MWF 900a-1130a  142 Dwinelle
M 1130a-200p  142 Dwinelle (screening)

Instructor: Alenda Chang

This introductory course will survey key developments in film history, beginning with the advent of sound cinema in the early 1930s and concluding with film’s transformation in the contemporary digital era. Along the way, we will become conversant with significant movements and genres in commercial narrative film (and to a much lesser extent documentary and experimental or avant-garde film), including classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema (musicals, Westerns, screwball comedies, and so on), Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave, New German Cinema, non-Western world cinema, and film in the age of “new” media.

Beginning with the transition from silent to sound film, we will pay particular attention to the relationship between sound and the moving image. However, crucial to our approach will be the recognition that film history is not simply the history of a medium; neither is there a single film history. Instead, there are histories—and these histories are inextricably tied to contested social and political histories. Our focus will therefore be on those films and texts that illustrate both the development of film styles and forms as well as important changes in the film industry—from censorship and the globalization of markets to radical alterations in the ways that films are shown and consumed.

The course will develop your ability to analyze individual shots (composition and mise-en-scène) and sequences (editing), while situating the films we view in relation to broader sociocultural and political contexts. Alongside general readings on film history primarily provided by David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film, we will also study nuanced secondary criticism from leading film scholars as models for film analysis and writing. A course reader will be made available at Replica Copy (2138 Oxford Street, 510.549.9991) during the first week of class, containing excerpts from the work of Ruth Vasey, Lee Grieveson, Michel Chion, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Lynn Spigel, Mary Ann Doane, Kristen Whissel, and others.

108.002

Film Genre:  The Spaghetti Western
TuWTh 1130a-200p  142 Dwinelle
W 200p-430p  142 Dwinelle (screening)

Instructor: Norman Gendelman

Italian “spaghetti Westerns” are in vogue. The Italian cinema’s popular reinvigoration of the centrally American genre from the 1960’s to the early 1970s has seen not only an ironic re-citation in popular American films (most notably in the films of Quentin Tarantino) but in other national cinemas (most notably in the films of Japanese filmmaker Kenji Miike) less overtly related to its generic legacy. The oft cited (if not wholesale pillaging) of its musical and formal motifs has become something of a staple in contemporary film. The subgenre is a rhetorically recognizable and autonomous cultural language that in many ways has exceeded the generic facility of its American counterpart. This class will explore the thematic and historical condition (as well as legacy) of the Spaghetti Western. Thinking thru its dual notion of history and nationality, the class will explore what the specific time-space “alienation” of this very different Western means. What does it say that a postwar national cinema creatively pastiches a genre centrally concerned with American history? How is this related to the economic and cultural realities of a post-war Europe engulfed within the broader idiomatic-ideological discourse of another culture? How is the genre figurally-historically charged and conditioned by Italy’s own 20^th century Fascist legacy? Finally, given its re-emergent influence, what does this say about contemporary notions of nationhood and ideology? As much as it is a national self-image related to a turbulent decade, how is it a global image of our own present?

128.001

Documentary Film
TuWTh 200p-430p  188 Dwinelle
Tu 430p-700p  188 Dwinelle (screening)

Instructor: Justin Vaccaro

This course is an historical, theoretical, and rhetorical overview of the genre of non-fiction – the documentary. We typically understand the documentary as having a special relationship to reality and to the truth. From cameras at the scene of an event to interviews with experts to the testimony of witnesses and participants, the documentary’s signature quality has been its ability to objectively record reality. However, a documentary, despite its name is never just a document. It is not so much that documentaries have a privileged access to reality as that they make truth claims about it. The documentary is not about recording but arguing.

We will view and engage with films from the hundred plus years, all of film history. In the process we will discover the many, almost infinite forms the documentary can take. We will see films that seem less realistic than Hollywood feature films alongside films that appear to be a completely objective registering of the world. Commercial films, art films, films commissioned by private and public institutions, films that celebrate, films that critique, films that explore, in all these films we will see how they ask and enable us to look again at the historical world around us.

151.002

Auteur Theory:  Coen Brothers
TuWTh 430p-700p  142 Dwinelle
Tu 700p-930p  142 Dwinelle (screening)

Instructor: Eileen Jones

In this course we will examine the films of writer-director-producer team Joel and Ethan Coen in terms of the ways in which these films confirm, challenge, and provide insight into existing theories of film authorship. The Coens are useful “trouble cases” when it comes to auteur theory, having positioned themselves and their work in an ambiguous relationship to the often-opposed categories that typically inform these theories: Hollywood studio and independent film practices, classic and postmodern filmmaking techniques, art film and mass entertainment aesthetics, and American and European critical sensibilities. We will screen and analyze many of the Coens’ major films including Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, No Country For Old Men, and True Grit.

Required Textbook(s): Course Reader