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Course Offerings for 2012-2013
First Year course offerings
Theories of National Cinema (9373A) - Fall term (Gittings) required course
Mondays 10:30-1:30 uc 12
Wednesdays 11:30-1:30 uc 12
The course will provide students with a rigorous interrogation of national cinema informed by theories of identity, nation, and globalization developed by Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha,
Stuart Hall, bell books, Roland Robertson and Edward Said. Students will trouble notions of nation as an organic, homogeneous, unitary entity before shifting into different study of ideology and cinematic representations of nation, distribution and the political economies that structure the production of national and transnational cinemas. Readings of the ‘national’ will be underpinned by understandings of class, gender, race and sexuality. Films from various imperial, colonial, national and diasporic cinemas will be examined in the context of debates about what constitutes the terrain of national cinema. To this end we will read essays by such leading national cinema scholars as Stephen Crofts, Andrew Higson, Susan Hayward, Marasha Kinder, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Philip Rosen, Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino.
to download the course syllabus click here
Brecht in World Cinema (9314A) - Fall term (Nagl) elective course
Thursdays 4:30-7:30 uc 12
Mondays 2:30-4:30 uc 12
This course investigates the historical and theoretical links between the Marxist aethetics of playwright Bertolt Brecht (1896-1956), the development of "political modernism" as a once influential paradigm in Film Studies and different modes of radical film-making in World Cinema. In this course, we will study key writings by Brecht on theater and the cinema ("epic" theater, the "v"-effect, realism/formalism, etc.) in the context of 1920s and 1930s Marxist debates on the "revolutionary" potential of film and "new" media (Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs, Bloch, Eisenstein) and trace Brecht's involvement in and influence on the cinema in his own era, both during the Weimar republic and his Hollywood exile. At the same time, we will look at the manifold usages Third World, black, feminist and left-wing European filmmakers made of Brecht's aesthetic strategies during the worldwide social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in their attempts to politicize film form and spectatorship and develop popular modes of film practice that challenge both the historical avant-gardes and commercial cinema. Finally, we will critically analyze the rise and shortcomings of theoretical "Brechtianism" in Film Studies (as an eclectic amalgam of Althusser's theories of ideology, Lacan's re-reading of psychanalysis, and Barthes' semiotics) and explore alternatives to theorize the political potential of the moving image after the "end" of cinema. Filmmakers discussed might include: Glauber Rocha, Fritz Lang, Nagisa Oshima, Jean-Luc Godard, Black Audio Film Collective, Santiago Alvarez, Dusan Makavejev, Alexander Kluge, Yvonne Rainer, Harun Farocki, Fernando Solanas, Miklos Jancso, Straub/Huillet, Ritwik Ghatak, Ousmane Sembene.
to download the course syllabus click here
European Migrations (9212A) - Fall term (Falkowska) elective course
Tuesdays 11:30-2:30 uc 12
Thursdays 12:30-2:30 uc 12
Movement and constant change of place of residence have become a modus operandi or a style of life for many Europeans. These spatial transitions result from important social and political changes in the past twenty years in Europe. The events principally referred to as causes of new migration are The Fall of the Communism, the impact of glasnost in the Eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern European Bloc, the unification of Germany and the formal creation of the European Union. All these phenomena have led to a shift in ideologies, they destabilized obvious divisions into the East and the West, the South and the North and allowed for the porosity of geographical borders and for the formation of new hybridized identities. The creation of the European Union has led to the disappearance of some borders, the diffusion of a common currency and the formation of a single market. The most interesting phase in these processes is the very phase of transition from the old phenomenon/entity/identity into the new one, which we will explore in the processes of acculturation and whitening, amoung others. We will discuss diasporic identities, migratory experiences and the geopolitical aesthetics in, amoung others, such films as Head-On (Gegen die Wand, dir. Fatih Akin, 2003), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), Exils (Tony Gatlif, 2003), Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears, 2002), and Last Resort (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, 2000) in view of theoretical approaches to road films (Timothy Corrigan, Kris Lackey and David Laderman) supported by the theories of borders and national identity of Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Crofts, Stuart Hall, Andrew Higson, Frederic Jameson, Philip Rosen, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. At the end of the course, we will also discuss some issues related to a different type of migration, that is, tourism, as explored by Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidoti, James Buzard, Robin Cohen, John Urry, Stuart Higson, Karen Kaplan, Michel Laguerre and Kathryn Woodward.
to dowload the course syllabus click here
Film Theories, Criticisms, Histories (9200B) - Winter term (Coates) required course
Tuesdays 11:30-2:30 uc 12
Thursdays 4:30-6:30 uc 12
Given the breadth of the range of possible issues to be covered by this course, it makes not pretensions to completeness in its review of some of the key forms of critisism, theory and history that have shaped Film Studies. Thus, althought its first week addresses a question that may be considered foundations - how films are to be categorized - along with an attendant issue - whether these categories also constitute value judgements - the logic that orders its subsequent weeks is that proposed by Adorno in Minima moralia: all sentences equally close to the centre. Subjects to be considered include: ideas concerning the 'ontology' of the image; authorship; theorizations of neo-realism and 'art cinema'; psychoanalysis; postmodernism; postcolonialism; genre; feminism; point-of-view; and sound, politics and the avant garde.
Research Methods(9100B) - Winter term (Blankenship) required course
Mondays 1:30-4:30 uc 12
Wednesdays 1:30-3:30 uc 12
This graduate seminar will provide a practical introduction to the distinctive, sometimes intertwined methods involved in the study of film, building on the ideas discussed in the required course, “Film Theories, Histories, and Criticisms.” In this course, students will begin to develop their own research projects. The focus of the course is two-fold. On the one hand, it will use the the work of Alfred Hitchock and Saul Bass as a case study for how different research methods in film studies are generated. We will recap major analytical and historical methodologies in film studies from "auteurism" to the "archival turn" and examine the effects these distinct modes of scholarship produce. Students will also begin to develop their own thesis topics in this course, as well as draft a short segment of the thesis itself as a seminar paper. Thus, by the end of this seminar, students will present and discuss some of their preliminary thesis research to the class as a whole, and generate a draft of their thesis prospecti in a forum that will allow students to receive feedback on the document before submitting it for approval to their respective advisors.
Second Year course offerings
Brecht in World Cinema (9314A) - Fall term (Nagl) elective course
Thursdays 4:30-7:30 uc 12
Mondays 2:30-4:30 uc 12
This course investigates the historical and theoretical links between the Marxist aethetics of playwright Bertolt Brecht (1896-1956), the development of "political modernism" as a once influential paradigm in Film Studies and different modes of radical film-making in World Cinema. In this course, we will study key writings by Brecht on theater and the cinema ("epic" theater, the "v"-effect, realism/formalism, etc.) in the context of 1920s and 1930s Marxist debates on the "revolutionary" potential of film and "new" media (Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs, Bloch, Eisenstein) and trace Brecht's involvement in and influence on the cinema in his own era, both during the Weimar republic and his Hollywood exile. At the same time, we will look at the manifold usages Third World, black, feminist and left-wing European filmmakers made of Brecht's aesthetic strategies during the worldwide social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in their attempts to politicize film form and spectatorship and develop popular modes of film practice that challenge both the historical avant-gardes and commercial cinema. Finally, we will critically analyze the rise and shortcomings of theoretical "Brechtianism" in Film Studies (as an eclectic amalgam of Althusser's theories of ideology, Lacan's re-reading of psychanalysis, and Barthes' semiotics) and explore alternatives to theorize the political potential of the moving image after the "end" of cinema. Filmmakers discussed might include: Glauber Rocha, Fritz Lang, Nagisa Oshima, Jean-Luc Godard, Black Audio Film Collective, Santiago Alvarez, Dusan Makavejev, Alexander Kluge, Yvonne Rainer, Harun Farocki, Fernando Solanas, Miklos Jancso, Straub/Huillet, Ritwik Ghatak, Ousmane Sembene.
to download the course syllabus click here
European Migrations (9212A) - Fall term (Falkowska) elective course
Tuesdays 11:30-2:30 uc 12
Thursdays 12:30-2:30 uc 12
Movement and constant change of place of residence have become a modus operandi or a style of life for many Europeans. These spatial transitions result from important social and political changes in the past twenty years in Europe. The events principally referred to as causes of new migration are The Fall of the Communism, the impact of glasnost in the Eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern European Bloc, the unification of Germany and the formal creation of the European Union. All these phenomena have led to a shift in ideologies, they destabilized obvious divisions into the East and the West, the South and the North and allowed for the porosity of geographical borders and for the formation of new hybridized identities. The creation of the European Union has led to the disappearance of some borders, the diffusion of a common currency and the formation of a single market. The most interesting phase in these processes is the very phase of transition from the old phenomenon/entity/identity into the new one, which we will explore in the processes of acculturation and whitening, amoung others. We will discuss diasporic identities, migratory experiences and the geopolitical aesthetics in, amoung others, such films as Head-On (Gegen die Wand, dir. Fatih Akin, 2003), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), Exils (Tony Gatlif, 2003), Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears, 2002), and Last Resort (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, 2000) in view of theoretical approaches to road films (Timothy Corrigan, Kris Lackey and David Laderman) supported by the theories of borders and national identity of Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Crofts, Stuart Hall, Andrew Higson, Frederic Jameson, Philip Rosen, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. At the end of the course, we will also discuss some issues related to a different type of migration, that is, tourism, as explored by Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidoti, James Buzard, Robin Cohen, John Urry, Stuart Higson, Karen Kaplan, Michel Laguerre and Kathryn Woodward.
to download the course syllabus click here