Courses

FSCP 81000/ Aesthetics of Television, [3 credits], Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with MALS 77100. In-person. 

This will fulfill a required course for the Film Studies Certificate. 

Instructor: Giancarlo Lombardi 

This course seeks to understand television drama as an aesthetic object, through a deep analysis of its formal structures tightly informed by several critical methodologies ranging from semiotics and psychoanalysis to cultural studies and deconstruction. We will set out to understand how television makes meaning through the consideration of its aural and visual components as aesthetic objects and will do so in a comparative context that will place American television drama in conversation with similar productions from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Each week, students will be asked to watch a full season of a television series and will be asked to analyze it at home and during class discussion. Among its chief learning goals, the course will foster (1) knowledge of primary methods and theoretical frameworks of television analysis; (2) application of such methods and frameworks through textual close reading of the television text; (3) written production of competent television criticism informed by such methods and frameworks. Tentative screening list: The Last of Us (US), Landscapers (UK), 1899 (Germany), The Kingdom (Argentina), Prisma (Italy), Baron Noir (France), The Lørenskog Disappearance (Norway), Frontera verde (Colombia), The Playlist (Sweden), Borgen: Power & Glory (Denmark), Squid Game (South Korea), Pachinko (Japan/Korea), 42 Days of Darkness (Chile), Total Control (Australia). 

Although the seminar will be conducted in person, 3 or 4 sessions will take place on Zoom. 

FSCP 81000/ Film Histories & Historiography, [3 credits], Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with MALS 77200. In-person. 

Instructor: Leah Anderst 

This will fulfill a required course for the Film Studies Certificate. 

Film History & Historiography surveys the cinematic medium from its inception to the present day with a focus on major historical, cultural, technological, and industrial developments. For our course, this will include: the growth of international silent cinema, Hollywood and the industrialization of film, the development of other sites of film production, nonfiction and nontheatrical traditions, European New Waves, Third Cinema, and independent film movements. The course will also cover different strategies and theories of historiography that reflect the research interests of the students in the class and will include a unit linked to a local archive under the auspices of the New York Public Library’s research divisions. The semester will include instruction on research methods taught in conjunction with the Mina Rees Library staff. 

FSCP 81000/ Politics as Performance and Style: From Cable News to YouTube, from Right to Left [3 credits], Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with THEA 81500 and ASCP 81500. In-person. 

Instructor: Reece Peck 

This will fulfill the elective course requirement for the Film Studies Certificate. 

In the twenty-first century, the public’s engagement with policies and elections has primarily happened through televisual/video representations. For better or for worse, media styles and consumer brands have become stronger sources of political identification than formal party activities as media corporations like Fox News and MSNBC have come to usurp many of the traditional roles that political parties once performed. In this hyper-“mediatized” political culture, the success of a politician or movement often hinges on their ability to produce compelling television and viral moments. And yet too often aesthetic appeals have been treated as a superficial part of political identity. Therefore, this aspect of political communication has received marginal attention from mainstream political analysts. But to ignore aesthetic style is to overlook a critical dimension of our political experience. 

This course combines political theory with cultural theory to explore the relationship between news aesthetics and ideology. In this course, students will examine the indirect ways in which partisan media outlets speak to their audiences and will zero in on the specific presentational techniques these outlets deploy to make political issues socially meaningful and emotionally compelling. Additionally, students will be asked to historically contextualize the hyper-partisan, click-bait-oriented media environment of today within broader histories of tabloid media and partisan journalism. Connecting the past to the present, the course also explores how increasing polarization in the political arena intersects with and is accelerated by the commercially driven algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and asks students to debate whether and to what extent these interlocking forces undermine journalistic standards and democracy itself. 

The course’s organizational structure — moving from Fox News to CNN and MSNBC, and finally to the “alt-right” and “alt-left” sectors of YouTube — is designed to accomplish the following learning objectives: (1) to understand the importance of aesthetics to journalism and political communication; (2) to reveal the stylistic linkages between older “legacy” media and newer “social media”; and (3) to explain how these stylistic affinities are incentivized by a similar commercial-economic logic. Finally, the course asks if there is any connection between particular presentation/performance strategies and particular ideologies and whether such connections are actively forged by political actors and media creators. This course will engage classic texts that have engaged the intersection pop culture, politics, and populism such as Stuart Hall’s Hard Road to Renewal (1988). It will draw from more contemporary work on populist media such as Benjamin Moffit’s The Rise of Global Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation (2016) and will use articles from the burgeoning literature on alternative online political media as well. The course will be graded by weekly response papers and a final essay. 

FSCP 81000/ Lorca, Buñuel, Dali: Theater, Cinema, Painting [3 credits], Wednesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with CL 86500. Online Synchronous. 

Instructor: Paul Julian Smith 

This will fulfill the elective course requirement for the Film Studies Certificate. 

This course, which is taught in English and requires no knowledge of Spanish, treats the drama of Federico García Lorca (paying attention to particular productions), selected films of Buñuel, and some fine art works by Dalí. It involves close reading of literary, cinematic and fine art texts and analysis of the voluminous and contradictory body of criticism on those texts. It also addresses such questions as gender and (homo)sexuality; tradition and modernity; the city and the country; and the biopic in film and television. The question of intermediality, or the relation between different media, will be examined in its historical and theoretical dimensions. The course will be graded by the final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly postings to course website and oral contribution to class (25%) 

FSCP 81000/ Film, Fashion, Media: Old and New, [3 credits], Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with MALS 71200. In-person. 

Instructor: Eugenia Paulicelli 

This will fulfill the elective course requirement for the Film Studies Certificate. 

Multidisciplinary in nature, the course will provide a critical approach to the history of fashion and film, the role of costume designers, actors, women, and aesthetic labor in the creative industries. 

As industries and cultural manifestations, fashion and film share many qualities and have always influenced each other in many ways. Both are spectacle and performance; both are bound up with emotions, desire, modernity, emulation and consumption.  

Although it might seem a recent phenomenon, already at the beginning of the twentieth century cinema was one of the most effective media for the launch of new fashions, lifestyles and codes of behavior. The course will approach film as a component of an archeology of media that bears on the convergence of technology and discourses. Readings will include texts on media, film and fashion theory.  

Considering the ubiquity of fashion-as-moving-image, the course will explore several forms of fashion films whose beginnings can be traced back to the silent era.  In addition to new digital cinematic forms, such as fashion films, the course will explore film in multiple contexts and frameworks, photography, fashion shows, cities and branding, and the politics of experimental forms of communication. Critical attention will be dedicated to a variety of film genres and fiction films, documentaries, television series, which have all become powerful platforms for the promotion of fashion, tourism and cultural capital in specific places and locations. 

FSCP 81000/ In the Afterlife of American Empire: Film & Fiction of Cuba and the Philippines Since 1945, [3 credits], Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with CL 80100. In-person.

Instructor: Jerry Carlson 

Using a variety of perspectives from postcolonial theory (not all of which will be from the Global North), the course will look at how artists in both countries have dealt with nation building after 300 years of Spanish colonial rule followed by "independence" as dictated by the USA In the Treaty of Paris (1898). Under the conditions of failed democratic experiments, extended authoritarian regimes, and profoundly entangled relations with the USA, both countries have produced multilingual writers and filmmakers who revise and correct the versions of national experience proposed by official state discourses. Both traditions take inspiration from founding father writer-revolutionaries martyred by the Spanish: José Rizal in the Philippines and José Marti in Cuba. Both countries have massive exilic communities in the USA that include high concentrations of artists. Cuban writers to be considered may include Alejo Carpentier, Eliseo Alberto, and Wendy Guerra. Cuban films may include Memories of Underdevelopment, Havana Suite, and Juan of the Dead, among others. Philippine writers many include Nick Joaquin, Jessica Hagedorn, and Gina Apostol. Philippine films may include Manila in the Claws of Light, The Woman Who Left, and Lingua Franca, among others.  

FSCP 81000/Screendance: Movement and Media, [3 credits], Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Room TBA. Cross-listed with THEA 81600 and ART 89600. 

Instructor: Edward Miller 

Both dance and film focus upon articulated and expressive bodies in movement, yet a film is a recording, assembled from a selection of images, effects, and sound files whereas dance is perceived as “live” and often described as ephemeral. What becomes possible when these two ontologically differing expressive modes intertwine? Many scholars in the last 20 years have argued that a new mediated form is created in this encounter, called screendance. This course is an introduction to screendance studies; it draws upon film and performance theory and does not require students to have a background in dance.  

We begin by reframing key collaborations between filmmakers and choreographers, beginning with Louis Lumière and Loie Fuller in Danse Serpentine (1896). We also look at Maya Deren’s collaboration with Talley Beatty in A Study of Choreography for Camera (1945) as well as Lucinda Childs’s work with Sol LeWitt in Dance (1979), Trisha Brown’s work with Babette Mangolte in Water Motor (1978), and Merce Cunningham’s work with Charles Atlas in Exchange (1973, 2013). Through reading key texts on cinema and movement (Gilles Deleuze; Jordan Schonig) as well as texts specifically on film and dance by Noël Carroll, Douglas Rosenberg, Thomas DeFrantz, Harmony Bench, Erin Brannigan, as well as essays from The International Journal of Screendance, we determine how race, gender, and physique informed how tap dance was filmed in Hollywood musicals, how Balanchine’s non-narrative ballets were transformed by PBS’s Dance in America in the 1970s, and how Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater of gender and courtship was filmed by directors as different as Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman, and Pedro Almodóvar. In the final third of the semester, we look at the strategies deployed by Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and William Forsythe in the late 20th century to incorporate digital imaging into their choreography. We conclude the course by looking at the aesthetics of new dance forms spread via social media platforms and videotelephony during the Pandemic, especially through TikTok dance challenges, Instagram dance classes, and Zoom dance parties.  

Students work on a portfolio that consists of a weekly response to the reading and the dance videos viewed in class. Weekly prompts are provided to enable students’ ability to write on dance and media critically and creatively and to identify a research area for students’ final projects. Although the focus of this course is primarily on American screendance, students are encouraged to research other traditions or occurrences for their final projects. 

FSCP 81000/ Film History III, [ 3 credits], Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA. Crosslisted with MALS 77200.  

Instructor: Peter Hitchcock 

Does the digital era mark, for better or worse, an end or the beginning of an end to a certain form of cinema history (naturally, a lament filmed in 35mm)?  This course will consider what pressure the digital puts on the concept of cinema in its history.  We will examine, for instance, changes at the level of production, distribution, exhibition, and critique.  All of these dynamics are enmeshed with questions of globalization, national cinema, and technological access.  Who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, would have envisaged companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple becoming the largest production providers in film history?  Rather than indulge in the joys of technological determinism, the course will follow a series of case studies delving the dialectical impress of digital and cinema that has profound implications for both.  Think, for instance, of the economies of scale achievable with digital, such that a contemporary iPhone ad can trumpet how one can shoot 4K cinema with a smartphone (admittedly, smartphone cinema is long-standing—Khalili’s Olive, shot on a Nokia N8 [Nokia!!] was released in 2011).  The wonder of antinomy in digital cinema is that anyone can now make a movie with decent production values, but the value of production is principally held by the aforementioned trillion-dollar oligopolists.  At the level of aesthetics (a significant schism between film and digital), we will investigate the ways in which vfx and cgi mediate meaning, affect, and the bottom line (all of which changes the content and style of moviemaking).  What is the art of acting in green screen?  You may not be ready for your closeup in UHD, but beauty is in the eye of post-production.  What is an actor, digitally?  How many digital subscriptions make a Cinema Collection (apologies to Criterion)?  Despite the hegemony of mega-corporations over digital, it has proved a boon to local and regional cinematic production.  What happens to Third World Cinema in the age of digital?  Is state cinema the appropriate arbiter of autonomy in the Global South?  Is new cinema not just digital but provocatively non-Western?  The course will also take up the thorny question of what constitutes a cinema experience.  Are VR goggles just Imax on your head?  Does it matter if home theater is a theater or not?  Surely watching on a Pixel is cinema too?  And Fortnite is more social than Fortress.  Is it ok to be watched, watching?  And, if digital means that cinema is becoming everywhere, does that mean it is becoming, in its own way, nowhere?  

Each week a movie will be assigned alongside one or more of the kinds of questions hinted at above.  There will also be associated readings drawn both from histories (like McKernan’s Digital Cinema, Willis, Hassan/Thomas, etc.) and from theoretical interventions (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Elsaesser/Hagener, Manovich, Trinh).   

A class presentation and term paper will be required in consultation with the instructor. 

CL 86500/ City Cinema and Urban Space: Paris, Rome, Mexico City, [2, 3, or 4 credits], Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Online synchronous.

Instructor: Paul Julian Smith

This course, which is taught in English and requires no reading knowledge of other languages, examines three films from different periods for each of three very different urban locations. Each week we will view one fiction feature, either classic and contemporary, read select secondary literature on that film, and, in the first half of the course, address a text within urban theory. Filmmakers will include Godard, Rossellini, and Cuarón; urban theorists will include Lefebvre, Certeau, and Castells. Close attention will also be paid to film form: mise en scène, cinematography, and editing in relation to the reproduction of the city in cinema. The course will thus provide a grounding in the study of both city cinema and urban space. It will be graded by final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly posting to course website, and oral contribution to class (25%). The midterm exam and final paper may be written in English, Spanish, French, or Italian. The final paper should be between 15 and 18 pages including bibliography in MLA style if you are taking the course for 3 or 4 units or 8 to 9 pages if you are taking the course for 2 units.

ENGL 89500/ Introduction to Media Studies, [2 or 4 credits], Thursdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, In-person. 

Instructor: Marc Dolan 

This course is an introduction to media studies for those who have mostly concentrated in English. We will spend less time on close readings of media artifacts and more time working in what media scholars call Industrial Studies. 

Film studios, comic book companies, recording labels, broadcast and streaming services, even traditional book publishers will all be considered in both their “privileged” and “independent” forms. While global conglomerates will occupy some of our time, we will also pay special attention to how national, regional, and subcultural structures produce their own unique variations of pervasive media forms, considering perhaps not only how a British TV serial emerges from a different media system from a US one, but also how the system that generates Mexican TV serials is overtly unique from the one that produces Brazil’s. Moreover, we will devote several weeks, not just to audience studies, but to the idea that the final labor on the creative “assembly line” is performed by the audience, who for the last two centuries have frequently shaped the final cultural positioning of enduring media artifacts much more than their creators might want to admit. 

Although the course’ first third will cover key concepts and theorists, much of the latter two-thirds will be guided by student interest. Students will make one brief presentation reviewing the literature in a specific subfield early on and then present a final project (i.e., talk, paper, syllabus, etc.) that best suits their specific academic needs. Active participation in all discussions is expected. 

SPAN 87200/ Cinematic Activism: Historical Memory, Migrations and Social Movements, [3 credits], Thursdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm 

Instructor: Isolina Ballesteros   

Through diverse interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches, and analyses of different audiovisual media, from fictional and documentary films to digitally distributed activist films, this course will discuss social activism regarding contemporary social issues in 21st-century Spain. We will explore the historical memory and post-memory of the Spanish civil war and the reevaluation of the transition to democracy; migration and immigration; social movements, political protests, and urban occupations; and LGBTQ and women’s rights. We will also analyze connections with social movements in Latin America. The emphasis will be on the study of aesthetic forms, collective and collaborative practices and modes of production, and the notions of impact, resistance, and dissent. The aim is a greater understanding of cinema’s role in social transformation. 

FSCP 81000/ Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, and On:  The Role of the Studio. [3 credits], Mondays, 4:00pm-7:00pm. Fully In-person. Cross-listed with MALS 77200.

This course will fulfill the Film History I or II requirement 

Instructor: Marc Dolan 

Many of the most treasured works in film history have been made in a studio environment, but what is a studio exactly? How does it work? Does the regular presence of hundreds of contracted actors, designers, editors, and directors under a single, centrally managed roof stimulate or discourage cinematic creativity (or maybe a little of both)?   

In this course, we will study the intersections of art and industrialism in a number of studios throughout the world across the last hundred years from Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Paramount in the early twentieth century US, to UFA and Cinecitta in Fascist Europe to Toho and Shaw Brothers in midtwentieth century Asia to India’s Mehboob Studio and Nigeria’s Rok Studio in the recent, global past.    

Each of us will prepare an annotated bibliography and 15-to-20-minute presentation (to begin one week’s discussion of a specific film studio) and will end the semester with a 5000-word essay on a topic related to any aspect of global film history that sheds light on the influence—positive or negative—of the studio system of production.  No prior knowledge of any of our weekly subjects is assumed, but curiosity is heartily encouraged. 

FSCP 81000/ Queer Auteurs? Almodóvar, Ozon, Ozpetek. [2/4 credits], Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Hybrid. Cross-listed with CL 80100. 

Instructor: Paul Julian Smith 

This course, which is taught in English and requires no reading knowledge of other languages, examines three European filmmakers from, respectively, Spain, France, and Italy, each raising different but related questions of gender, sexuality, and nationality. The course begins with a consideration of the much debated but still key question of auteurism, attempting to go beyond the consideration of individual aesthetics into institutional questions of production processes and industrial contexts. It also asks how these themes intersect with the fragile and provisional position of queer content in the cultural field, frequently at odds with the established prestige of the auteur. The course goes on to examine three feature films by each of its chosen directors. Films will include Almodóvar’s Bad Education (‘La mala educación’, 2004), Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks (‘Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brulantes’, 2000), and Ozpetek’s Ignorant Fairies (‘Le fate ignoranti’, 2001; remade by the director as a TV series in 2022). Reference will also be made to specimen secondary literature on the three filmmakers. The course will be graded by final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly posting to course website, and oral contribution to class (25%). The midterm exam and final paper may be written in English, Spanish, French, or Italian. 

FSCP 81000/ Aesthetics of Film. [3 credits], Thursdays, 4:00pm-7:00pm.  Fully In-Person. Crosslisted with MALS 77100, ART 79400 and THEA 71400. 

Instructor: Nicole Wallenbrock 

Aesthetics of film is an essential course for graduate students of any field who wish to write with expertise about film and film matter. In this course students will learn the very specific vocabulary needed to communicate the way in which film generally, and a film specifically, functions—for this reason, Film Art by David Bordwell and Karen Thompson will be our primary text. We will screen films together that will serve as primary examples of one film element under discussion. Articles by film scholars and theorists in Dropbox will supplement our study, such as Robert Stam and Louise Spence, "Colonialism, racism and representation," and Linda Williams, “Mirrors without Memories.” 

We will begin with a study of film narration (Carol Todd Haynes, 2016). We will next do a thorough study of how elements of film, such as lighting (Passing, Rebecca Hall, 2021) composition, camera movement (Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021), set design/location (Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1971), color, duration, editing, sound/music (Sorry to bother you, Boots Riley, 2019), and casting (Wanda, Barbara Loden, 1971) impact the narrative and alter our perception of characters and events. We will constantly question why (and when) a film is canonized and what might represent a disruption (for example the experimental shorts Meshes in the Afternoon Maya Deren, 1941 and Scorpio Rising Kenneth Anger, 1963). Class discussions may at times highlight depictions of race and gender, but also incorporate the effect streaming and small screens have on filmmaking styles and reception. 

FSCP 81000/ Beyond Adaptation: Transmediality, Narrative Ecosystems, and Spreadable Media. [2/3/4 credits], Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Fully In person. Cross-listed with CL 86500. 

Instructor: Giancarlo Lombardi 

This course will focus on the theoretical and practical study of narrative storyworlds depicted across different media and platforms. It will be divided in three modules. In the theoretical module, we will depart from Linda Hutcheon’s seminal study of adaptation to discuss Henry Jenkins’s theorization of transmedia storytelling and spreadable media as well as Guglielmo Pescatore and Veronica Innocenti’s definition of narrative ecosystems.  

In the second module, our theoretical understanding of transmedia storytelling will be applied to two case studies, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, which will be analyzed in great depth through their ability to engage readers and viewers through compelling narratives that morph across media and platforms in ways which will be gradually teased out and interrogated. Sharing the same location, the city of Naples defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘porous’ for its theatrical architecture and for its ‘inexhaustible law of life’, the transmedia storyworlds originated by Ferrante and Saviano will be investigated for their diverse ability to establish setting not merely as background but as actual protagonist.      

In the final module, students will conduct their own independent analysis of transmedia ‘chains’ of their choice, across a wide variety of ‘texts’. Examples include the cinematic, operatic, and televisual adaptations of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw; the many revisitations across time and visual arts of Marcel Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Allain and Souvestre’s Fantomas; the retelling of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping in theatre, cinema, tv, and fiction; the fictional portrayal of the Banda della Magliana in Giancarlo De Cataldo’s Romanzo criminale and its many adaptations;  the Marvel, Star Wars, Walking Dead, and Star Trek universes; the complex multimedia diegetic worlds of Lost, 24 and, more recently, Game of Thrones; the many multimedia ‘origin stories’ reinventing the birth of western society via popular historical novels, films and television series. 

[3 credits], Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Room 3416. Cross-listed with MALS 77300. In-person. 

Instructor: Jerry Carlson 

The movies – that is, narrative feature films – have always been recognized as a powerful medium for storytelling. Indeed, a century of censorship attests to the fears provoked by film’s seductive spell. FSCP 81000 will explore how that spell is created by the many strategies and tactics of storytelling, some shared with other media, others unique to cinema. To do so, we will engage with the history of narrative theory (or, narratology, as Tzvetan Todorov coined it in 1969). What explanatory powers do different theories offer? Our survey will move from Aristotle’s foundational Poetics to pre-cinematic theories of fiction (for example, Henry James), from the Russian Formalists to French high theory (Barthes, Genette, et al.), and from Neo-Formalist explanations (Bordwell) to ideologically positioned interventions from Marxism, psychoanalysis, queer theory or other approaches. We will put each theory in conversation with a pertinent feature film. The range of screenings will be global and diverse in narrative forms. Filmmakers may include, among others, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Nicolas Roeg, Raul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman, Wong Kar-wai, and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. A number of questions will recur as we explore different theories. What is plot? How can the effects of plotting be explained? What are the options for cinematic narration? What is in common with other media? What is medium specific? How can narratology explain the nature of cinematic authorship? How does cinema create characters? How can it place them in social context or explore their subjectivity as they journey through the plot. The precision of our answers will help explain the spell of the movies in their social, cultural, historical, and emotional impact.

[3 credits], Tuesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm. Cross-listed with MALS 77100 and CL 85000. In-person. 

Instructor: Giancarlo Lombardi

This course seeks to understand television drama as an aesthetic object, through a deep analysis of its formal structures tightly informed by several critical methodologies ranging from semiotics and psychoanalysis to cultural studies and deconstruction. We will set out to understand how television makes meaning through the consideration of its aural and visual components as aesthetic objects and will do so in a comparative context that will place American television drama in conversation with similar productions from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Each week, students will be asked to watch a full season of a television series and will be asked to analyze it at home and during class discussion. Series will include Scenes from a Marriage, Mare of Eastwood, Succession, The Affair (US) as well as Squid Game (Korea), Bad Banks (Germany), Borgen (Denmark), The Paper (Croatia), Beforeigners (Norway), Lupin (France), Money Heist (Spain), 3% (Brazil), and various productions of In Treatment from all over the world. Among its chief learning goals, the course will foster (1) knowledge of primary methods and theoretical frameworks of television analysis; (2) application of such methods and frameworks through textual close reading of the television text; (3) written production of competent television criticism informed by such methods and frameworks.

[3 credits], Wednesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm. In-person. 

Instructor: Peter Hitchcock 

Obviously, while the global pandemic has spurred new interest in the genre of viral calamity--films like Outbreak, Contagion, 28 Days Later, etc--the subject and sense of apocalypse has been integral to the history of cinema itself, as if its apparatus and ways of seeing open up the art before the otherwise inscrutable and abstract concepts of doom and end of days.  To some extent this can be measured in the formal compulsions of visual narrative, and it is for this reason that film is often interpellated to address the immediacy and affective intimacy of catastrophe (an apocalypse “nowness” if you will).  This course is intended to examine both the genealogies of representing apocalypse in film, a longue durée, say, from Verdens Undergang (1916) to #Alive (2020), but also to explore the situatedness of individual narratives that struggle to express both the desire and disavowal of imagining the end of the species and that of the world.  With the sensitive dependence to historical conditions, for instance, Cold War catastrophe could be linked to anxiety about nuclear destruction (films like Fail-Safe [1964] or Dr. Strangelove [1964]) or sci-fi doppelgangers around Soviet invasion (The Thing from Another World [1951], The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951], Them! [1954]).  We will look to complicate the conditions of spectatorship between, for instance, The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the perhaps radiation-tainted reanimation of “ghouls” and zombies, and Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), where even the banalization of annihilation is banalized.  Indeed, the latter connects to a whole sub-genre of laughing in the face of the cannibalistic undead (Shaun of the Dead [2004]) or murderous aliens, (Mars Attacks! [1996], Attack the Block [2011]).  The demise of the human is often imagined as a consequence of overpopulation or the end of reproduction, from Soylent Green (1973) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) to Children of Men (2006), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and The Girl with All the Gifts (2016).  Here we will consider why apocalypse is often linked to normative assumptions about gender and sexuality and the transformations of social reproduction as such.  The racialization of future dread is also a significant focus of cinema, and where racial anxiety is both exposed and critiqued (Alien Nation [1988], District 9 [2009], Us [2019].  Indeed, apocalypse as a theme can be used to cross-reference and interrogate the codes of conscious and unconscious identification and alienation throughout the genre.  Apocalypse from this perspective might offer discourses of a great leveling, and yet it is just as clear that film attempts to negotiate the gnawing persistence of inequalities on a world scale (the reproduction of class hierarchy in, for instance, Elysium [2013] and Snowpiercer [2013]).  While cinematic apocalypse is never an unalloyed barometer of social anxiety, the effulgence of films of environmental catastrophe is significant in its own right.  Often such narratives offer an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction: The Day after Tomorrow (2004), for instance, seems to place its bets on a father and son reuniting, while The Wandering Earth (2019) envisages the entire planet being dragged to safety.  This suggests that fighting for change may not have the visual allure of suffering the consequences of quiescence.  Nevertheless, in general the cinema of the apocalypse is the scene of conflicted allegories over and above the sublation of causes and effects, and the readings for the course will move between theory and fiction to elaborate this tension (including Cameron, Chaudhary, Gurr, Knight, Kristeva, Martin et al, McCarthy, Missari, Seed, Sharrett, Shaviro, Sontag, Stone, Subramanian, and Vandemeer). 

A class presentation and term paper will be encouraged. 

[3 credits], Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm.  Cross-listed with CL 80100.  In-person. 

Instructor: Paul Julian Smith 

This course involves three aspects to be treated each week: first, a close collective reading of the text of Cervantes’s masterpiece; second, an analysis of the rereading of Don Quixote by later authors from Proust and Nabokov to Lukacs, Primo Levi, and García Márquez; and, finally, an introduction to the varied audiovisual versions of Cervantes’ original text, from different periods and countries. The course will graded by final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly postings to course website, and oral contribution to class (25%). 

[3 credits], Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Cross-listed with French 70700.  In-person. 

Instructor: Boukary Sawadogo

African cinema was birthed out of the imperative need for Africans to appropriate the gaze against the backdrop of discursive othering in colonial cinema. Being in front and behind the camera allowed more nuanced and complex African stories to be told from African perspectives by pioneering filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, and Moustapha Alassane in the 1960s. The historical development of African cinema is marked with the use of the medium as an instrument of political and cultural liberation, and a critical reading of postcolonial African societies depicted onscreen. Technological development—video in the 1990s followed by digital in the 2000s—has led to democratized access to filmmaking and the emergence of diverse voices and practices. From a theoretical standpoint, African cinema can be regarded as a form of oppositional cinema, with similarities to the anti-establishment vein of the Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Cinema Novo, and Third Cinema. More recent trends include a gradual shift toward transnational cinema with production, distribution and consumption which involve local stakeholders, the (new) African diaspora, and transnational media companies such as M-Net, Netflix, Showmax, Disney, and HBO. Also, the ecosystem of local film industries is being shaped by several African governments passing laws or creating film funds to enable the emergence of sustainable local film industries. More film schools are created to locally train professionals. Festivals, and televisual and online distribution are bringing content to local audiences on a multiplicity of screens. 

[3 credits], Mondays, 11:45am-1:45pm.  (Cross-listed with ENGL 85500. In-person. 

Instructor: Michael B. Gillespie

This course is devoted to the study of the idea of black film as an enactment of black visual and expressive culture. With attention to the critical and creative capacities of film blackness, the course considers new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, intertextuality, and pleasure. Avoiding reductive considerations of the idea of black film in terms of authenticity/truth, a fixed category, or by way of a representational politics of positive and negative images, the course instead advocates for greater attention to film as art and the discursivity of blackness. 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. (Cross listed with CL 86500)
Instructor: Paul Julian Smith

This course, which is taught in English, treats the drama of Federico García Lorca, selected films of Buñuel, and some fine art works by Dalí. It involves close reading of literary, cinematic and fine art texts and analysis of the voluminous and contradictory body of criticism on those texts. It also addresses such questions as tradition and modernity; the city and the country; and the biopic in film and television. The question of intermediality, or the relation between different media, will be examined in its historical and theoretical dimensions. The course will graded by final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly postings to course website and oral contribution to class (25%). 

3 credits
Tuesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm. (Cross-listed with MALS 77200)
Instructor: Ria Banerjee 

This course will engage with the history of cinema from the advent of sound to the present, and take a granular approach to studying particular movements within film history over the last half of the twentieth century. We will pick our way through the diverse and variously situated developments in global film, aiming for geographical breadth in developing our comparative understanding of film history over the almost-century that this course covers. In US cinema, we will study the history of United Artists as an independent production company, and the development of African American cinema from Oscar Michaux and Gordon Parks to Ava DuVernay and Shonda Rhimes. In post-World War II Europe, we will consider how movements like Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and New German Cinema overlapped with and departed from each other aesthetically and ideologically. Occurring simultaneously, we will consider the development of arthouse cinema in India in the 1950s-70s and its resistance to the overwhelming influence of the mainstream film industry that has come to be known as Bollywood. Other course modules might consider Dogme 95, US documentary films, and contemporary feminist responses to the New Latin American Cinema.  

As we travel through such distinct cinematic terrain, our course will consider the interplay between tradition and individualism, taking the poet T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on the subject as our point of departure. Eliot suggests that there is much porosity between the seeming monolith of “tradition” and individual expressions of aesthetics and ideology, leading us to question the alternate genealogies of film that we will study. We will take a similarly porous approach to our considerations of media beyond the strictly filmic—into photography, web artifacts, and streaming video, for instance.  

Students will be asked to contribute weekly discussion questions, to lead one seminar session along specified guidelines, and to produce a final research project developed in consultation with the instructor. While academic writing is welcomed, students will be encouraged to consider culminating responses to the course beyond the 15-20 page research paper, for instance by centering pedagogy in annotated syllabus design, creative projects like video essays, or researched non-academic writing.  

3 credits
Mondays, 4:15pm-8:15pm. (Cross listed with ENG 87400)
Instructor: Michael Gillespie 

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to American cinema with a focus on noir films of the 1990s that considers their distinctive measure of genre not as fixed category but as discourse or what James Naremore calls “the history of an idea.” Students will study how these films consequentially restaged themes of criminality, detection, the social contract, the city, and the ambiguities of good and evil. Rather than defer to the classical noir model students will instead consider how this period posed distinct enactments of film form, historiography, culture, gender, sexuality, class, and race/ethnicity. Films might include the following: Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991),  Devil In A Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), Homicide (David Mamet, 1991), The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999), The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990), Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997), Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992), Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995), Suture (Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 1993), The King of New York (Abel Ferrara, 1990), Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992), Doom Generation (Greg Araki, 1995), Bound (Lana and Lily Wachowski, 1996), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992), and Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995). 

3 credits
Tuesdays, 10:00am-1:00pm. (Crosslisted with THEA 81500).
Instructor: Racquel Gates 

Given early cinema’s connection to stage performance, it should come as little surprise that many of the tropes and representational strategies that the cinema adopted to portray blackness developed out of traditions of minstrelsy and blackface. This seminar will examine the ways that “performing blackness” has played a crucial role in the evolution of cinema, whether from the perspective of Jewish artists trying to establish their racial identities in early Hollywood, or African American artists attempting to subvert dominant representational modes. While the course will focus heavily on Hollywood cinema and mainstream media, it will also incorporate discourses from performance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies. Screenings will cover a large range of genres and historical periods. 

3 credits
Thursdays, 4:15pm-7:15pm. (Crosslisted with MALS 77300). 
Instructor: Ria Banerjee 

This course will provide a survey of film and media theory, with special consideration to how filmmakers of the Global South were inspired by classic writings in cinema and sought to use them to develop their own unique creative idioms. We will move chronologically through key cinema studies and performance theory readings, each week juxtaposing them with works by filmmakers working outside traditional or mainstream cinema in linguistic cultures such as Hindi, Bengali, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, as well as Anglophone indie filmmaking in Britain and North America. 
 

3 credits
Thursdays, 4:15pm-7:15pm. (Crosslisted with MALS 77300).
Instructor: Ria Banerjee

This course will provide a survey of film and media theory, with special consideration to how filmmakers of the Global South were inspired by classic writings in cinema and sought to use them to develop their own unique creative idioms. We will move chronologically through key cinema studies and performance theory readings, each week juxtaposing them with works by filmmakers working outside traditional or mainstream cinema in linguistic cultures such as Hindi, Bengali, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, as well as Anglophone indie filmmaking in Britain and North America. 
 

3 credits
Tuesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm. (Crosslisted with MALS 77200). 
Instructor: Leah Anderst 

Film Histories & Historiography surveys the cinematic medium from its inception to the present day with a focus on major historical, cultural, technological, and industrial developments. These may include: the growth of international silent cinema, Hollywood and the industrialization of film in relation to Bollywood, Nollywood, and the development of other sites of film production, nonfiction and nontheatrical traditions, European New Waves, Third Cinema, independent film movements, and the rise of television, digital, and streaming cinema. The course will also cover different strategies and theories of historiography that reflect the research interests of the students in the class and may include a unit linked to a local archive under the auspices of the New York Public Library’s research divisions. The semester will include instruction on research methods taught in conjunction with the Mina Rees Library staff. 

3 credits
Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. (Crosslisted with ART 89600 and THEA 81500)
Instructor: Ivone Marguiles 

Re-enactment, a common strategy for reconstructing past events in cinema, has, in the last four decades gained a new critical currency as a way to articulate history and the embodied self. This course, composed of lecture, discussion and in class presentations, explores the impetus for selfrevision via reenactment looking at cinematic appropriations of pedagogic, clinical and legal models (such as talking cures, psychodrama, public testimony and truth and reconciliation commissions) to deal with the past. The questions that guide the course relate to the distinct temporalities involved in replaying past events as they are mediated and displayed in film. When and how does it matter if an event is unique or recurring, or that a person acts their story? What is the status of ageing in reenactment? We will discuss the part reenactment plays in memorial and testimonial practices and what is the interface between theatrical and therapeutic repetition and how verbal recall differs from mimetic replay; the role of reenactment in social documentaries, in historical and biographical films; in classic examples of cinema verité and role-play; and in testimonial and allegorical films featuring the original protagonists on camera. We consider the ritual, psychological and evidentiary connotations of reenactment in cinema and in related practices (commemorative pageants, mass theatrical spectacles, battle reenactments; psychoanalysis and tribunals) as well as its currency in contemporary art. We will examine related discourses and debates on affective history; on performance and the archive (the relation between live and reproduced events) and the relation of reenactment with other realist and referential modes.The course is loosely organized historically moving from the 30s (the heyday of social documentaries and early formulations on reenactment) to neorealist instances of exemplary; from verité cinema of the sixties (engaged with psychodrama and self-analysis) to contemporary testimonials starting with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and The Thin Blue Line (1985).

3 credits
Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm. (Crosslisted with CL 80100)
Instructor: Jerry Carlson 

For the Caribbean the period since 1945 has been the most joyous, turbulent, and traumatic since the “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Recent historical events include independence, decolonization, revolution, civil war, invasion, rapid modernization, and massive emigration to Europe and North America. It has also been 75 years of robust artistic activity in response to the region’s social, cultural, and political history. Our course will investigate how novels and feature films have contributed to that artistic wealth. We will study works from the three imperial language groups: English, French, Spanish. Our scope will consider the greater Caribbean that includes continental territories (for example, Cartagena. Colombia) and cities of diasporic concentration (most obviously, New York). We will examine how Caribbean storytelling has rendered three chapters common to the territories: plantation economies supported by slavery; agrarian post-abolition colonial societies; and urban cultures in the region and its diaspora. What makes these works Caribbean? We will not be looking for the one true story of origin. Eschewing essentialism, we will try to describe the many entangled aspects that exist as a dynamic system of relations. Prose fiction may include works by, among others, Alejo Carpentier, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Rhys, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maryse Conde, V. S. Naipaul, and Leonardo Padura. Films may include, among others, The Other Francisco (Cuba), Sugar Cane Alley (Martinique), The Harder They Come (Jamaica), Strawberry and Chocolate (Cuba) and Cocoté (Dominican Republic). Critical writings will be drawn from theorists such as Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Winter, and Antonio Benitez Rojo. 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15. (Crosslisted with SPAN 85000 and CL 86500).
Instructor: Paul Julian Smith

This course, which is taught in Spanish, examines the modern Spanish city. It addresses the media of novel (Martín Santos, Laforet, Goytisolo), visual art (painter Antonio López, web artist Marisa González), and, especially film (Almodóvar, Amenábar, Alex de la Iglesia, Montxo Armendáriz, Ventura Pons) and television (TVE’s classic serials Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta, El Deseo's urban dramedy Mujeres, Antena 3's sitcom Aquí no hay quien viva).  

Each class examines an urban theorist (e.g. Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Manuel Castells), a work of criticism by a scholar of Spanish urbanism, and one or more creative works.  

The aims of the course are thus to familiarize students to the representation of the Spanish city in visual media; to train them in textual and formal analysis; and to integrate urban theory into media studies. 

Grading is by written exam (25%), student oral participation, weekly web posting, and presentation (25%) and final paper (50%). 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm
Instructor: Jerry Carlson
 
The movies – that is, narrative feature films – have always been recognized as a powerful medium for storytelling. Indeed, a century of censorship attests to the fears provoked by film’s seductive spell. FSCP 81000 will explore how that spell is created by the many strategies and tactics of storytelling, some shared with other media, others unique to cinema. To do so, we will engage with the history of narrative theory (or, narratology, as Tzvetan Todorov coined it in 1969). What explanatory powers do different theories offer? Our survey will move from Aristotle’s foundational Poetics to pre-cinematic theories of fiction (for example, Henry James), from the Russian Formalists to French high theory (Barthes, Genette, et al.), and from Neo-Formalist explanations (Bordwell) to ideologically positioned interventions from Marxism, psychoanalysis, queer theory or other approaches. We will put each theory in conversation with a pertinent feature film. The range of screenings will be global and diverse in narrative forms. Filmmakers may include, among others, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Nicolas Roeg, Raul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman, Wong Kar-wai, and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. A number of questions will recur as we explore different theories. What is plot? How can the effects of plotting be explained? What are the options for cinematic narration? What is in common with other media? What is medium specific? How can narratology explain the nature of cinematic authorship? How does cinema create characters? How can it place them in social context or explore their subjectivity as they journey through the plot. The precision of our answers will help explain the spell of the movies in their social, cultural, historical, and emotional impact.

3 credits
Tuesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm. Course sponsored by MALS
Instructor: Leah Anderst
 
Film History I is an intensive examination of film history before 1930 that introduces students to international silent cinema, to the scholarly literature on early cinema, and to the practices of researching and writing film history. Subjects covered will include the emergence of cinema, the cinema of attractions, the narrativization of cinema, theater and early film, sound, color, and the “silent” image, the industrialization of film production, national cinemas of the 1910s, the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, women and African-American filmmakers, and film movements of the 1920s. Students will study the work of such filmmakers as Lumière, Méliès, Porter, Paul, Bauer, Christensen, Feuillade, Weber, Micheaux, Murnau, Dulac, Eisenstein, and others while considering the ways that silent films were exhibited and received in diverse contexts.
 

3 credits
Thursdays, 11:00am-2:00pm, Sponsored by Theatre
Instructor: Amy Herzog

This course will provide a survey of Film and Media Theory, with a particular focus on activist media and strategies of resistance.  The seminar will be organized historically, spanning Soviet revolutionary films, 1960s newsreel collectives, Third Cinema movements, labor organizing media, activist television, contemporary anti-gentrification media, and digital and social media production. Each session will juxtapose mainstream fictional and non-fictional representations with contemporaneous media produced by independent resistance groups, as well as studies of the labor conditions and economic structures that shape the media industries during that period. Each student will research their own “constellation” of historical media texts, and media-based creative projects will be encouraged.

Questions of intersectionality and power will be core to this course. What formal strategies have emerged at different historical moments, and toward what ends? How do industry structures, distribution networks, and exhibition contexts impact the meaning of media texts? Who performs what labor within the media technology industries, and how is access determined? What historical forces impact the evolution of film and media theories? How can spectatorship theorized in relation to diverse media audiences and transforming sites of consumption?

Readings and screenings will include readings and media works by Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Third World Newsreel, Chicana Por Mi Raza Media Collective, Racquel Gates, DIVA TV, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Mariame Kaba, Cardi B, and Lisa Nakamura.
Student research projects will culminate in a final paper and multimedia dossier. Project proposals and field notes will be shared via a course website, and findings will be presented in class.

3 credits
Thursdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm.  Sponsored by Comparative Literature.
Instructor: Giancarlo Lombardi

This course will juxtapose the rich and complex film production of two Italian auteurs, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. While Fellini and Antonioni’s films differ in style, narrative preference, and political orientation, they evidence a common self-reflexive concern for the relationship of cinematic images, sounds, and stories. Neorealism will serve as a starting point for an analysis of Fellini’s postmodern negotiation of autobiographical surrealism as well as Antonioni’s peculiar reframing of cinematic modernism.  This course will analyze Antonioni and Fellini’s most important films, placing their work in (film) historical contexts, and theorizing their interest in the aesthetics of cinematic representation and the politics of storytelling. Students will be asked to watch 2 movies a week, one in class and one at home, so that by the end of the course they will be familiar with the majority of these filmmakers’ work.  Films to be screened include:  Story of a Love Affair (Antonioni, 1950), La Signora Senza Camelie (Antonioni, 1953), The Vanquished (Antonioni, 1953), Love in the City (Antonioni/Fellini, 1953), Le Amiche (Antonioni, 1955), Il Grido (Antonioni, 1957), L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960), La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), L’Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962), Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964), Blowup (Antonioni, 1966), Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970), The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975), Beyond the Clouds (Antonioni, 1995), Eros (Antonioni, 2004), The White Sheik (Fellini, 1952), I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953), La Strada (Fellini, 1954), Il Bidone (Fellini, 1955), Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957), La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960), 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini, 1965), Satyricon (Fellini, 1969), Roma (Fellini, 1972), Amarcord (Fellini, 1973), Orchestra Rehearsal (Fellini, 1978), And the Ship Sails On (Fellini, 1983), Ginger and Fred (Fellini, 1986). The course will be conducted in English and all films will be screened with English subtitles.

3 credits
Tuesdays, 6:30PM-8:30PM. Sponsored by English.
Instructor: Wayne Koestenbaum

An experiment in placing poems (from the last 100 years) alongside short films and videos, to observe affinities of structure, method, rhetoric, syntax, sensibility, prosody, voice, design, and process between the two varieties of composition—poetic, filmic.  (For now, I’m using the word “film” to encompass video and film.)  The poems we read may make no direct reference to cinema;  the films we see may make no direct reference to poetry.  Some of the parallel modes we might observe include cut, gesture, close-up;  juxtaposition, assemblage, list;  speech, automatism, noise;  line, stanza, apostrophe;  symbol, synecdoche, allegory;  found language, found imagery;  mistake, correction, erasure;  reclamation, magnification, detritus;  quotation, summary, avoidance;  interruption, flow, edge;  music, shadow, echo;  elegy, colloquy, monologue;  artificiality, sincerity;  allusion, appropriation, homage;  rebellion, subordination, documentary.  Possible poets:  H.D., Max Jacob, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Melvin B. Tolson, Lisa Robertson, Fred Moten, Barbara Guest, Sylvia Plath, José Lezama Lima, Renee Gladman, Nathaniel Mackey, Friederike Mayröcker, Frank O’Hara, Kevin Killian, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Tonya M. Foster, Cathy Park Hong, Samuel Beckett, Aaron Kunin, Joan Murray, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Mónica de la Torre, Adrienne Rich, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Anne Carson, Nicanor Parra, Bertold Brecht.   Possible film-artists:  Man Ray, Maya Deren, Joseph Cornell, Rudy Burckhardt, Marie Menken, Bruce Baillie, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Clarke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sky Hopinka, Joyce Wieland, Helen Lee, Mary Lucier, Gunvor Nelson, Sandra Lahire, Lily Jue Sheng, Dziga Vertov Group, Lorna Simpson, Sadie Benning, Joan Jonas, Ximena Cuevas, Mary Reid Kelly, Janie Geiser, Stan VanDerBeek, Yoko Ono, Hito Steyerl, Anaïs Nin, Rea Tajiri, Germaine Dulac, Zeinabu irene Davis, Chick Strand, Lydia García Millán.  (The syllabus is not yet fixed;  I welcome further suggestions from students who plan to take the course.)  We will try not to force the issue of magical correspondences between poem and film.  But we will have the pleasure of juxtaposing some unusual instances of visual and verbal art.  Requirements:  oral presentation and a final project.  This project may be multi-genre and multi-media;  it may also be used as an occasion to compose some element of the Portfolio Exam.

3 credits
Tuesday, 4:15 - 6:15 PM
Instructor: Prof. Lev Manovich (lmanovich@gc.cuny.edu)

The topics course is designed to introduce students to many influential ideas and works by key modern and contemporary thinkers about media and technology. Because historically these ideas were developed in relation to particular technologies and media that came into prominence in different periods, we will also explore aspects of media history including photography, film, radio, television, Internet, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and data art. Some of the discussions will use as starting points Manovich's own selected articles and chapters from his books The Language of New Media, Software Takes Command, Instagram and Contemporary Image, and Cultural Analytics (forthcoming). all texts used in the class are freely available online.

3 credits
Thursdays, 4:15pm-7:15pm. Crosslisted with MALS 78500.
Instructor: Marc Dolan 

This course will survey a range of examples of one of the most common film genres of the last century: the biographical film.  In our meetings, we will pay special attention to how the preparation and execution of film biographies resemble and depart from that of their print equivalents.  

In our introductory class we will watch a sampling of one-reel biographies from the first few decades of filmmaking, and then move swiftly in our second week to Abel Gance’s wide-screen tricolor epic Napoleon (1927).  (We will probably view the latter film in conjunction with Stanley Kubrick’s notes for his ultimately unproduced film on the same subject.)  Next, we will engage Alexander Korda’s pioneeringly satirical The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), two films that are oddly resonant with contemporary trends in midcentury print biography, the debunking and Annales strains respectively.  Our early twentieth-century unit will then conclude with Daniel Mann’s sincerely melodramatic I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), a popular biographical film of its time that had been almost instantly adapted from Lilian Roth’s bestselling 1954 memoir.  

By this point in film history, the biographical genre was so well-established that filmmakers could play with it more.  In the late twentieth-century, biographical film took more turns toward segmented or selective depictions of a subject’s life, as witnessed by David Lean’s grand slice of a life Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Andrei Tarkovsky’s six-piece, meditative Andrei Rublev (1966), and Spike Lee’s stylized and similarly segmented Malcolm X (1992).  Our survey will conclude with two special cases: Todd Haynes’ range of archetypal biography from Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) to I’m Not There (2007); and Shkehar Kapur and Cate Blanchett’s decade-long collaboration on a single biographical subject in Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007).  Our last weeks of meetings before student presentations will form a transhistorical coda for the course, with classes on parallel film biographies of Cleopatra (from DeMille/Colbert, Mankiewicz/Taylor, Roddam/Varela, and others) and Abraham Lincoln (from Griffith/Huston, Ford/Fonda, Spielberg/Day-Lewis, and others).  

Students will be expected to prepare an annotated bibliography, 15-to-20-minute presentation, and a 5000-word essay on a topic related to biographical film.  

Readings will be assigned from such works as George F. Custen‘s Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History, Dennis P. Bingham’s Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: Biopic as Contemporary Film, Ellen Cheshire’s Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures, and at least chapter 3 of Rick Altman’s Film/Genre, as well as individually apposite biographical excerpts. 

3 credits
Mondays, 4:15pm-8:15pm. Crosslisted with THEA 81600 and CL 80100. 
Instructor: Boukary Sawadogo 

The birth and development of African cinema in the 1950s started against the backdrop of the discourse of othering in colonial cinema. This is evident in the underlying civilizing mission of documentaries (education, health, agriculture) and travelogues. In addition, there is the quest for exoticism in Hollywood adventure/action film subgenre that prominently feature the three figures of the blonde, the safari hunter, and the native. African cinema started gaining international attention and recognition in the 1960s, with the works of pioneer filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, and Moustapha Alassane. The historical development of African cinema until 1990 is marked with liberation struggle, appropriation of the gaze, and cultural nationalism. From a theoretical standpoint, African cinema can be regarded as a form of oppositional cinema in the vein of anti-establishment movements of the Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Cinema Novo, and Third Cinema.  

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15. Crosslisted with SPAN 85000
Instructor: Paul Julian Smith 

This course treats the drama of Federico García Lorca, the silent and Spanish-language films of Buñuel, and some fine art works by Dalí. It also involves close reading of literary, cinematic and fine art texts and analysis of the voluminous and contradictory body of criticism on those texts. It also addresses such questions as tradition and modernity; the city and the country; and the biopic in film and television. The question of intermediality, or the relation between different media, will be examined in its historical and theoretical dimensions. The course will graded by final paper (50%), midterm exam (25%), and final presentation, weekly postings to course website and oral contribution to class  (25%). 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm.  Crosslisted with SPAN 87100. 
Instructor: Paul Julian Smith 

This course, which is taught in English and requires no knowledge of Spanish, compares and contrasts Spanish and Mexican cinema and television of the last three decades. The course will address four topics in film: the replaying of history, nationality and transnationalism,gender and sexuality, and regionalism and urbanism; and will further study aspects of television fiction. Feature films will be viewed in subtitled versions. Methodology will embrace analysis of the audiovisual industry, film form, and theory. The course grade will be made up of final paper and related presentation (50%), class contribution and weekly postings (25%),and take home exam (25%). 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm.  Crosslisted with ENGL 87400. 
A 2 or 4 credit option will be offered through English (ENGL 87400)
Instructor: Wayne Koestenbaum 

This seminar offers a chance to delve into visual works that might be called “essay films.”  A perplexing category;  a fruitful category;  a pretext for flight, for immersion, and for an end to naysaying.  Critic Tim Corrigan argues that “although for many the notion of an essay film remains less than self-explanatory, this particular mode of filmmaking has become more and more recognized as not only a distinctive kind of filmmaking but also, I would insist, as the most vibrant and significant kind of filmmaking in the world today.” (Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film:  From Montaigne, after Marker, Oxford U. Press, 2011.)  Artists studied will include such unclassifiables as Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Werner Herzog, Marlon Riggs, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Isaac Julien, Jonas Mekas, and Ja’Tovia Gary, among many other possibilities.  We will read some theoretical texts about the literary essay and the essay film:  Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, André Bazin, Hito Steyerl, Laura Mulvey, Nora Alter, and others.  As an ancillary aim, the course will consider how essayistic modes of filmmaking cast light on the contemporary practice of the literary essay (Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and others).  Students will have the opportunity to write about essay films, and, if desired, to experiment with the making of an essay film.  No auditors. 

3 credits
Tuesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm.  Crosslisted with MALS 78500.
Instructor: Elizabeth Alsop

This course will explore female filmmakers’ contributions to global cinema from the studio era to the present, with a particular focus on the ways women have navigated and responded to dominant modes of film production, distribution, and representation. Our primary goals will be to examine the history of women’s labor and creativity in the cinema, while also reckoning with the devalorization of that labor, both in film studies curricula—which has often deprecated the work of women in popular Hollywood genres—and in film history, which continues to minimize the role of female directors in epochal movements. We’ll analyze our weekly screenings in terms of aesthetics and ideology, and consider the ways female filmmakers have engaged with the discourses of feminism, as well as questions of race, class, and sexual identity. We’ll conclude by considering how recent developments, including the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements, have affected women’s roles within the 21st-century media landscape. Screenings may include work by Ida Lupino, Agnès Varda, Věra Chytilová, Chantal Akerman, Barbara Loden, Claudia Weil, Elaine May, Lina Wertmüller, Susan Seidelman, Lizzie Borden, Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, Andrea Arnold, Claire Denis, and Lucrecia Martel. Students will be asked to read essays by scholars such as Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Judith Mayne, Teresa de Lauretis, Tania Modleski, Lúcia Nagib, and Patricia White, among others.  

Among the questions we might ask: What have been the prevailing structural constraints faced by female directors in various national contexts? How have industry expectations and cultural biases—regarding gender, genre, and audience—shaped the careers of female filmmakers, and in turn, existing canons? How might film history better account for the work of female editors, producers, and writers, and what is the feminist potential of less auteurist accounts? What should feminist viewers do with the “bad” objects of popular culture? Finally, what “progress,” if any, has been made when it comes to women’s representation behind the camera? How and to what extent might the rise of streaming television platforms be changing the game? 

Students will be asked to produce weekly 1-page response papers and a final, 15-20 page paper or creative project. Members of the class would be responsible for facilitating one class session, which includes generating questions and curating additional resources about our screening using a class blog on the CUNY Academic Commons.

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm Crosslisted w/ THEA 81600 and MALS 78500,
Instructor: Edward Miller

This seminar examines theories of nonfiction media and performances of the self. We begin by looking at depictions of the self in cinéma vérité and direct cinema in the 1960s. Filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, and Fred Wiseman eliminated the artifice of voice-over, interviews, archival footage, and incidental music and made use of new lightweight equipment to create a new mode of documentary. They were especially drawn to capturing backstage views of rock stars (such as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie) as well as gaining access to interactions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations (such as in mental institutions, on the road selling bibles, working in political campaigns). In their attempt at recording life as it occurs, an unintended consequence emerged as an aspect of these films--theatricality. This theatricality arises not from the staging of situations per se, but in the freedom the filmmaker gives subjects to act out and to pretend as if the filmmaker was not there. Indeed this contradiction generates riveting performances of self as the presence of the camera motivates and frames conscious and unconscious techniques of playing a role.

The course traces a selective history of nonfiction film and television since 1960, starting with the assembling of Parisians in Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer (1961). We distinguish the strategies of directors who represent the "other" in films like the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens (1975) and Shirley Jackson's Portrait of Jason (1967) with the tactics of mediatized self-portraiture utilized by feminist artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, and Cindy Sherman. We pay attention to on-screen performances of gender and race due to the influence of identity politics on many of the key nonfiction works of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied (1989), Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989), and Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990). Finally, we assess the impact of groundbreaking reality television like An American Family (1971) that features the flamboyant Lance Loud and the third season of The Real World (1993) that stars the AIDS activist Pedro Zamora to investigate the connections and disconnections between these antecedents and contemporary reality television. This course integrates film, media, and performance theory and enlists an interdisciplinary approach to understand the emphasis upon declarations--and repudiations--of self in contemporary media culture.

3 credits
Thursday, 11:45am-2:45pm. Crosslisted w/ THEA 81500
Instructor: Marc Dolan

This is a course in the most recent era of international cinema, an age in which the digital tools, digital media, and digital communication of the contemporary world have transformed nearly every aspect of filmmaking—right down to making the word “film” increasingly obsolete. 

We will begin with magnetic tape, the forerunner of digital media in so many regards, from its institutional adoption in midcentury broadcasting and the increasing use of video assist on film sets to the surprisingly slow adoption of videotape as an alternative means for cinematic consumption and the eventual, symbolic shift from home movies to home video.  (Steven Soderbergh’s Sex Lies and Videotape [1989] will serve as an emblematic instance in this regard.)

We will then consider the first significant contribution of computers to film: computer-generated special effects.  We will probably trace this trend a few decades back to its (retrospectively) crude beginnings in the mostly practical effects of 2001 and Star Wars but we will mostly focus on the leap forward made in such middle-period James Cameron films as The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which are interesting, not just in terms of the creation of visual worlds and creatures, but in terms of how interacting with those new creations subtly transformed the work of actors and cinematographers in turn.


The last phase of the course will consider how the full embrace of digital cinematography has transformed both action heroes (Skyfall (2012]) and less commonly represented members of society (Tangerine [2015]).  We will conclude our common viewing with Ang Lee’s revolutionary Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), which is simultaneously intimate and epic, using the new technology to stretch our concept of how the affective experience of a story’s characters may be rendered in cinema.

Throughout the course, technological changes will be the premises of our discussions, never their conclusions.  Our focus will be on how new tools and techniques have affected preexisting methods of film production, distribution, and consumption, as such other innovations as synchronized sound, color, variations in aspect ratio, etc. have done in previous eras. 

Readings will be assigned from Paul Haggis, Digital Filmmaking [rev ed], Michael Curtin, Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television, and Andre Gaudreault’s The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems, as well as miscellaneous essays.

Students will be expected to prepare an annotated bibliography, 15-to-20-minute presentation, and a 5000-word essay on a topic related to this important transition in global cinema.

3 credits
Monday, 2:00pm-6:00pm. Crosslisted with COMP LIT 85500
Instructor: Jerry Carlson

In recent decades cultural theorists have embraced the concept of the Global South as a way of exploring the many uneven relations of resources, development, and governance that exist between the wealthy industrial nations and their clients, external and internal. Since World War II a considerable body of narrative film has been created that explores these conditions while issuing from the Global South itself.
This course maps and explores the many cinemas of the Global South that have been created in the Americas.

Close readings of films will be combined with historical, cultural, and theoretical texts
The first half of the course will emphasize foundational works from the 1960s and 1970s: Cuban revolutionary cinema (i.e. Memories of Underdevelopment); Brazilian Cine Novo (i.e. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman); independent African-American films (i.e. Killer of Sheep); and others.

The second half of the course will emphasize the emergent cinemas of recent decades. This may include such films as Guarani (Argentina/Paraguay), City of Men (Brazil), Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia), Sand Dollars (Dominican Republic), Ixcanul (Guatemala), Daughters of the Dust (USA) and Smoke Signals (USA) and Sugar (USA / Dominican Republic).

Critical texts may include writings by filmmakers such as Julio Garcia Espinosa, Glauber Rocha, and Julie Dash as well as theory by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Epistemologies of the South), Walter Mignolo (Local Histories / Global Designs), Robert Stam & Ella Shohat (Unthinking Eurocentrism), and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature), among others.

2-4 credits for Comp Lit; 3 credits for Film Studies
Tuesday, 6:30pm-10:00pm. . Cross-listed w/ 85000
Instructor: Giancarlo Lombardi

Television has enjoyed a creative resurgence in the US, virtually depleting and replacing the once thriving independent film industry. At the same time, the advent of digital platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime has facilitated the local distribution of foreign serial drama, granting access to productions that were once imagined as strictly bound to a national target of viewers. In Europe, the merger of BSkyB, Sky Italia, and Sky Deutschland has led to the restructuring of a media conglomerate that promoted the simultaneous airing of prestige European serial drama across several countries, including the US. The global launch of Netflix has not only led to increasing worldwide distribution of American serial drama, but also to the company’s growing investment in the creation of local original series, to be distributed simultaneously all over the world.

This course proposes a comparative approach to television drama, through the specific study of prestige serial drama, namely TV series usually connoted by high production values, naturalistic performance style, narrative complexity, stylistic integrity, and committed viewer engagement.  Our investigation will be guided by the narratological concerns raised by Jason Mittell in Complex Television, and inflected by the application of theoretical tenets until now largely associated with the study of comparative literature. While maintaining its firm footing in the specific critical tools associated to the study of television, this course grafts onto the study of television questions raised in Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, investigating serial drama in its global positioning and in its nationalistic investments, identifying its national aesthetics and its political dependencies, its loci of assimilation and its forms of rebellion against dominant paradigms dictated by Hollywood. Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of power and capital in his study of sites of force(s) and struggle(s) in the field of cultural production, Benedict Anderson’s definition of imagined communities, and Arjun Appadurai’s investigation of imagination as social force in identity creation will all contribute to our reading of a diverse group of television series, analyzed through questions of genre, themes, and format. For the purpose of limiting what is already an incredibly vast field of inquiry, comedies will not be taken into consideration.

Series discussed in this course will include Cleverman (Australia), 13 Commandments and Public Enemy (Belgium),  Pure (Canada), 1864, The Rain, and Ride Upon the Storm (Denmark), Les Revenants and Churchmen (France), Dark (Germany), Srugim and Fauda (Israel), Gomorra, Suburra, The Thirteenth Apostle, and The Miracle (Italy), The Young Pope (Italy-US), Top of the Lake (New Zealand), Mammon (Norway), Night and Day (Spain), Jördskott (Sweden), Broken, Fortitude, and The State (UK), The Handmaid’s Tale, True Detective, The Sinner, Westworld, American Gods, Preacher, The Path, The Leftovers (US)

2 or 4 credits
Tuesday, 6:30pm-10:00pm. Cross-listed with FREN 70700
Instructor: Sam Di Iorio
 
The word ‘modern’ designates slippery terrain in postwar French cinema. Some define it in reference to historical events, making cinematic modernity indivisible from the cataclysm of the Second World War, the global unrest of the 1950s and 60s, or the advent of post-industrial society. Others foreground the word’s aesthetic dimensions, using the phrase cinéma moderne to evoke formal innovations that were variously associated with Neorealism, the New Wave, or Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura. Our course is situated at the juncture of these diverging paths. In order to examine how competing notions of the modern emerge in French film and French film criticism between 1945 and 1968, we will look to history as well as aesthetics, and trace this contested term’s connection to postwar debates about a cinematic avant-garde, to the reinvention of montage in French documentary, to the rehabilitation of aesthetic classicism in the 1950s, and to the international turn towards the New Cinemas of the 1960s.
 
Our weekly 6:30-10:00PM sessions will include a film screening as well as discussion. Please note that this course is offered in French: all readings will be in French and some films will not be subtitled. Films will include shorts and features by Roberto Rossellini, Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais, Charles Chaplin, Jean Rouch, Raoul Walsh, François Truffaut, Carole Roussopoulos, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel, and Shirley Clarke. Readings will include essays by André Bazin, Claude Edmonde-Magny, Serge Daney, Sylvie Lindeperg, Antoine de Baecque, Nicole Brenez, Éric Rohmer, Hélène Fleckinger, and Roland Barthes.

3 credits
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Cross-listed with SPAN 87200
Instructor: Paul Julian Smith

This course examines the works of contemporary Spain and Mexico's most successful filmmakers, critically and commercially. These two figures might appear to be very different and, indeed, have formally collaborated only when Almodóvar produced del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, shot and set in Spain. Although he has greater transnational projection than perhaps any other European filmmaker, Almodóvar has filmed all twenty features in his home country and language; while del Toro, with just ten films, has made for himself a nomadic career in two languages and three countries. 

The aims of the course are industrial, critical, and theoretical. First, Almodóvar is placed in the context of audiovisual production in Spain, while del Toro (as director and producer) is contextualized within the 'golden triangle' of Mexico, Europe, and the US. Second, both cineastes are interrogated for signs of auteurship (a consistent aesthetic and media image), sharing as they do a self-fashioning that takes place, unusually, within the confines of genre cinema (comedy/melodrama and fantasy/horror, respectively). Finally, the course explores how English-language critics have assimilated these two Spanish-speaking directors to debates in Anglo-American film studies that draw on psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and the transnational.

Grading is by written exam (25%), student oral participation and presentation (25%) and final paper (50%). 

x Credits
Thursdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Instructor: Eugenia Paulicelli
 
 
Fashion and Film share a highly interactive quality. As two of the most well=-known and widespread commercial industries to grow out of modernity, cinema and fashion have always had a synergetic relationship insofar as both use the technology of the camera and that of the body and performance. Costume is integral both to the actor’s performance and to the cinematic rendition of visual narratives and experience. Since the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century, the film scene has constituted a virtual shopping window for clothes, exhibiting and making desirable the newest fashions and goods available at department stores. Film costumes have not just borrowed from fashion and haute couture, but have also inspired the production of the newest fashion. Costumes in cinema have been used as narrative tools for telling stories on screen that emphasize character identity and development while also attracting a larger audience. More recently, the digital genre of “fashion film” has become a widespread advertising and storytelling tool for fashion luxury brands such as Ferragamo, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci, among others. The course will be structured in four sections that will explore in depth the historical context of the interaction of film/fashion/costume from the silent era up to the present. Some rare American, Italian, and French films will be shown from the 1920s. The course will also include   Hollywood films from the 1930s; films from the 1950s and 1960s; and contemporary production in film, fashion, music video and screen media.  The role of women as audience, actors, characters and designers as well as gender representation will be studied as will race, queer and ethnic identities. Many actors, and performers, for instance, were immigrants from Europe and established a high profile in the Hollywood industry from the beginning of the 20th century. Fashion and film are multibillion industries that are nourished by immaterial narratives and emotions and as such play a pivotal role in attracting tourism, business and culture. This is particularly crucial in a global city such as NYC where the creative industries thrive. The course will include guest speakers and visits in NY based sites of studio and costume archives and a “Practice Lab” with a NY based designer.

3 credits
Wednesday, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Room TBA,
Professor Cathy N. Davidson and Professor Racquel Gates
Futures Initiative course – (Course Number 57419)
Crosslisted with ASCP 81500

What does it mean to be “cool,” to be “fierce,” or to “slay”? This course focuses on technologies, techniques, performance, and style (including fashion) as components contributing to our ideas, representations, conventions, and stereotypes of race. More specifically, this course asks how cinematic and media aesthetics have contributed to how we identify and “read” blackness in popular media. Rather than treat film, television, and new media as straightforward reflections of social realities, this course will analyze how the media established, and continues to shape, our understandings of what blackness “looks” like. This course asks how popular culture has created the aesthetic vocabulary for how media consumers “read” blackness in all of its various incarnations.
 
This is an ideal course for anyone in the humanities and social sciences, for those interested in traditional and new media, and for anyone looking for sophisticated, critical, and original approaches to issues of race, racism, and representation in American popular culture.  In addition, the course will be using a number of active learning pedagogical techniques that will both make this a lively “workshop” of ideas to which every student will contribute and will offer anyone who is teaching, at any level, a new set of methods, activities, and ideas about active learning and the teaching of controversial, difficult, and complicated subject matter.

3 credits
Tuesday, 11:45am-3:45pm (C419). Cross-listed with MALS 77300 and THEA 71600
Instructor: Michael Gillespie
 
This class engages with how cinema complicates, renders, and critiques the idea of history. In this way, this class will examine how cinema narrativizes or enacts a writing of history in the terms of ‘visual historiography.’ If historiography is the study of the writing of history, then this class will consider the cinematic writing of history with attention to narrativity, the purpose of historical narratives, and the significant values and meanings attributed to history. Furthermore, the class will focus on the emplotment of history by the visual and the significant epistemological questions about the shared impulse of narrativity between history and film as visual art. We will explore questions of truth and authenticity, temporality, the production of historical knowledge, memory and remembrance, trauma, and power. Our focus will take a critically disobedient approach in the sense that we will treat the films as historiographic interventions while also avoiding the fidelity concerns that most often shadow discussion of film and history. Thus, these films will be treated as distinct acts of visual historiography that consequentially confound and enliven our understanding of history and the critical capacities of visual art.

3 credits
Wednesday, 4:15pm-8:15pm (C-419). Cross-listed with THEA 81500 and MALS 78500
Instructor: Ria Banerjee

This course will examine the interaction between a film’s employment of genre and the conflicts it depicts, defined broadly and globally. We will begin with the opening premise that genre fundamentally affects subject matter, so any analysis of film involves attention to the interpellation of form and content. War, an enormity of violence, seems to ask for “serious” filmic forms such as the documentary or drama; what happens, then, when it appears in forms that appear on the surface to be less serious, frivolous even?

This redefinition of the parameters of a “war film” means that we will begin the course with a rigorous discussion of what the term means to us as a class using a classic of the genre such as Apocalypse Now. We will then consider the way that other genres have deployed conflicts: for instance, the American Civil War in the classic Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the fantasy thriller Pan’s Labyrinth set in Franco’s Spain. World War II will inevitably form a bulk of our investigations. We will range from documentary film with a turbulent reception history like Night and Fog, to the depiction of Vichy France in the romance Casablanca, and World War II intrigue in The Third Man. Class discussions will also cluster around the Partition of India in 1947, a displacement of fourteen million people that is considered one of the bloodiest recent upheavals. We will discuss the ways that it is invoked in big budget Bollywood musicals like Earth versus in Ritwick Ghatak’s low budget indie trilogy from the 1960s. Can comedy accommodate serious conflicts? We will approach this question by discussing the Crusades and holy war in light of the self conscious silly-serious medievalism of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Other genres we might consider include historical romances (Gladiator), horror/sci-fi (District 9), and animation (Waltz with Bashir), keeping an eye on the different conflicts they reference. Television has contributed its own powerful note to this question of genre; time permitting, we will consider treatments of conflict in The Twilight Zone and Prisoners of War (Hatufim), among others.

Since we will range widely in both genres we consider and the conflicts shown on film, students will be asked to present on one conflict of their choice from the syllabus; they will also contribute weekly to blog posts and class discussions. Final paper of 15-20 pages with view to publication in a suitable academic forum.

3 credits
Tuesdays, 4:15pm-8:15pm (C-419), Sponsored by MALS (MALS 77100)
Instructor: Leah Anderst

Film Aesthetics provides students with the basic skills necessary to read and analyze the formal and stylistic components of film, both historical and contemporary. This course introduces the student to various genre of narrative cinema and categories of film (for example, silent comedy, melodrama, film noir, documentary, animation, and experimental, among others) produced in the United States and internationally. As students survey the work of important film theorists and apply it to films screened in class, they will master the fundamental vocabulary of film analysis and will learn to recognize the techniques and conventions that structure the cinematic experience – narrative systems, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, genre – in order to understand how these various components combine to yield film form and have developed over the history of the form.

Each student will lead discussion on one of our weekly readings and write two formal papers: a scene analysis essay due around the midterm point, and a longer seminar paper at the end of the semester on a topic of their choosing related to our course screenings, readings, or topics. This second paper will require a project proposal as well as an annotated bibliography of research sources. Readings for the course will be drawn heavily from Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson (11^th edition) as well as additional articles provided. 

3 credits
Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Room 6114. Sponsored by MAMES (MES 74900)
Instructor: Bilge Yesil

This course examines politics, religion and culture in the Middle East through the lens of media forms and practices. It analyzes how Middle Eastern media shape (and are shaped by) global cultural flows and national and inter-regional politics. Topics include but are not limited to political activism and democratization; consumerism and modernity; youth, media and civic participation; women, media use and female empowerment. Taking into consideration the heterogeneity of media and political systems across the region, the course pays special attention to the articulation of national identity, modernization and Islam in various countries. The course also covers Islamophobia in the United States and Europe, and examines its historical roots, its connections with colonialism and Orientalism, and media representations of Arabs and Muslims in Western media. Special attention is paid to September 11 and the War on Terror, and the “migrant crisis” in Europe and rise of right-wing nationalism. The course is based on mini lectures, class discussions and presentations, occasional guest speakers and screenings (documentaries, films, reality TV shows, music videos, etc.). Students do not need to have prior knowledge of media history, theories or methods.

Wednesday, 4:15 pm-7:15 pm (C419)
Instructor: Edward Miller

This course is an introduction to mediatized dance performance. We address the following: how do choreography and cinematography correlate as modes of inscription and expression? Certainly the cinematic enterprise is concerned with how bodies repeat and refuse a rehearsed trajectory but in what ways do viewers experience how the camera is subjected to a charted course? How does delivery system, media platform, and venue impact reception? In order to share a common vocabulary in the aesthetics of film and video we read selections from Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2015). We complement this with pertinent reading in media theory, including Guiliana Bruno’s Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2016), WJT Mitchell’s Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (2015) and Carol Vernallis’s Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (2013). This vocabulary allows us to analyze the aesthetics of heralded moments in dance/film history including the work of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Gene Kelly, the choreography of Agnes DeMille, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins in the Hollywood Musical, the avant-garde dance films of Maya Deren, films by and about Pina Bausch and her company including those by Wim Wenders and Chantal Ackerman, the collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, the filmed experiments by Judson pioneers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and the dance videos of Michael Jackson, Missy Elliot, and Beyoncé. In our discussions of dancefilms, we foreground the expressivity and performativity of gender, race, and sexuality and how this is enabled by media. Key texts in the exploration of film/video as movement are Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1986) and Giorgio Agamben’s essay “Notes on Gesture” (1992); key texts in the examination of dance in film/video include Douglas Rosenberg’s Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (2012) and Erin Branigan’s Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (2011). We also read relevant texts by dance theorists/historians including Mark Franko, Tommy DeFrantz, and Sally Banes as well as “classic” texts in mediatized performance from Philip Auslander, Matthew Causey, and Steve Dixon. We complete the course by analyzing the social choreography of political resistance and explore how contemporary protest movements are devised, represented, and amplified via various forms of media.

Tuesday, 4:15 pm-8:15 pm (C419) Cross-listed with MALS 77300
Instructor: Elizabeth Alsop

This course will explore the international development of film as an art form, industry, and medium of communication from approximately 1930 to the present. That is to say, it will survey the evolution of film culture from the advent of sound, to an era in which modes of production and reception are once more undergoing transformation as a result of digital technologies, globalization, and media convergence.
 
Through weekly screenings and readings, students will gain familiarity with key traditions and trends in U.S. and global cinema. Subjects will include early sound film; French Poetic Realism; Italian Neorealism; postwar Japanese cinema; film noir and other classical Hollywood genres; the rise of international “new waves”; the impact of European art cinema; American independent film; emergent non-Western cinemas (including filmmakers from Latin America, Iran, and New Zealand); and the global blockbuster.
 
Several topics will recur throughout the semester: the trajectory of realism as a cinematic aesthetic; the persistence and global transformation of Hollywood genres; the historical contributions of female directors to world cinema; and the ways international filmmakers have responded to and challenged Hollywood modes of production. We will pay particular interest to the challenges of historiography, and discuss the ethics, politics, and logistics of “doing” film history, as well the role critics and scholars play in consolidating (or revising) dominant film historical narratives.
 
Students will be asked to engage in close analyses of individual films, while also examining the various contexts from which these films emerged. Films to be screened might include: M (Fritz Lang, 1931), The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939), To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsh, 1942), Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946), Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966), Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976), Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1988), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990), The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, 2006), and Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017). In-class screenings will be supplemented with clips and occasional at-home viewings.
 
Readings will be drawn from a number of sources and posted to our course site on the CUNY Academic Commons; in addition, students will also be asked to purchase Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America. (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film History (3e) is recommended, but not required.)
 
Students will complete a 15-page paper on a topic of their choosing, which engages with the concerns of the course; a formal proposal will be due midway through the semester. In addition, they are also expected to actively contribute to class discussions; to submit weekly blog posts in response to that week’s screening and reading/s; and to make at least one presentation.
 

Monday, 2:00 pm-6:00 pm (C419) Cross-listed with THEA 81600
Instructor: Jerry W. Carlson

FSCP 81000 will offer an analytical survey of film theory from its classical period to its multiple voices in the 21st century. The course will explore the robust and never predictable conversation between film theory and film practice. Different film theories perform different functions. Each theoretical position will be examined in its historical context and for its own claims of purpose. To what degree are theories prescriptive, descriptive, practical, analytical, or some dynamic mixture of functions?  Theorists under consideration, among others, may include Arnheim, Balázs, Barthes, Bazin, Deleuze, Deren, Fanon, Eisenstein, Hall, Jameson, Kracauer, Metz, Mulvey, Naficy, Rich, Shohat, and Stam. In addition, each theoretical position will be examined next to a film from the period of the theory and a film from another historical moment. What do theories tell us about films? But, equally important, what do films tell us about theories? The repertoire of films will reach beyond Hollywood and Europe to the riches of global cinema. The key textbook will be Critical Visions of Film Theory: Classic & Contemporary Readings by Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White with Meta Mazaj.