This course serves as an introduction to film analysis. This class fosters a critical awareness of how the language of film employs image and sound to produce meaning and elicit spectatorial response. Beginning with cinemas debts to series photography, the course concentrates on film form, teaching students to attentively analyze films in relation to mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, narrative, and meaning. Preparing students, especially film majors, for a deeper study of film, the course equips students with an analytical vocabulary for storyboard and scene analysis, as well as an understanding of key historical and critical concepts regarding film. Film & Media Studies 85A is a prerequisite for 85B and 85C (exceptions by permission of instructor only), as well as for the three-quarter film history sequence, Film Studies 101A-B-C. NB: In addition to being a requirement for the Film & Media Studies major, 85A-B-C also fulfills Humanistic Inquiry Breadth Requirement for non-Humanities majors.

This course is the third in a three part series in film history. 101A and 101B focused on the historical evolution of cinematic practices, and on the convergence between the historical context and the motion picture industry. This course, 101C, is structured as a survey class in an attempt to give you an introduction to international film movements and styles between 1960 and the present. We will address viewings with the following questions in mind, 1. How do these films contribute to various Histories of Cinema e.g., international film history, the history of national film movements, the history of film style, the history of film marketing, the history of technology? 2. Through what cinematic means do these films depict historical periods, documentary, fiction, fictional documentaries?; 3. In what ways do these films conform to and diverge from traditional US cinematic conventions, such as editing, lighting, mise-en-scene, characterization? and 4. What are the modes of narration employed in these films? What stories do they tell and how do they tell them? Prerequisites: Film Studies 85A and 101A and 101B. Course requirements: prompt attendance and participation, noteboards, mid-term exam, final exam.

Whereas most of the curriculum in FMS focuses on film, television, and new media texts or technologies, this course shifts focus to conceptions of the spectator/viewer/user. This course will consider how cultural studies has theorized popular entertainment’s effects on audiences, how film theorists have theorized spectatorship, how television audiences have been studied, and how the interactivity of new media has suggested new text-technology-user relationships. The core of this course will focus on the now-canonical ideological and psychoanalytic film theory that emerged in the 1970s and that has continued to bear influence and to inspire revisions to account for more complex identities and viewing positions.

This course introduces students into the heterogeneous terrain of feminist film theory, and the various areas of convergence as well as debate that characterize this important field of film and media studies. This course engages crucial issues in feminist film theory, as interrogated and inflected by queer and postcolonial critique. Accordingly, the course looks at a range of issues, among them: debates surrounding the gendered nature of the gaze, feminist historiography, genre scholarship, race, class, and subjectivation, audience studies, and nation and postcoloniality. The class is structured as a seminar, with an emphasis on developing the student's ability to analyze and articulate a theoretical argument. Prerequisites: Film and Media Studies 85A-B-C and 101A-B-C.

This class will explore the principal modes, styles, and genres of Los Angeles cinema from the silent period to the present. Traditions of silent film, comedy, film noir, documentary, and avant-garde production will be considered with respect to questions of how and in whose voice the film medium can lay claim to representing a shifting and contradictory urban actuality. Readings in film history and Los Angeles history. Course requirements include take-home midterm and final research paper.

Stanley Kubrick remains one of the most paradoxical figures in American cinema, a maker of personal films who avoided publicity, an intellectual who produced popular entertainment, and a master of film technique whose work approached technology with skepticism. This course will consider the relation of his films to their literary sources through close readings of novels including Barry Lyndon, Lolita, Spartacus, Dream Novel, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and other short fiction. Students should be prepared to read several hundred pages per week. Our goal will be to understand the practice of cinematic adaptation and the diverse traditions of understanding Kubrick's legacy. Course requirements include take-home midterm and final research paper.

Students learn about "the world of the screenwriter" by reading and studying screenplays, and writing parts of them-including the beat outline, treatment and character biography. Assignments include reading, viewing and analyzing selected films; and writing papers that explore facets of the screenplay such as structure, character and theme. The final grade is based on participation/attendance, writing the set-up for an actual feature film and storyboarding a traditional 3-act screenplay. Senior majors have first priority for enrollment via authorization codes available in the Department Office (235 HIB). This course has a non-refundable Lab Fee.

This course introduces the fundamentals of film production using digital video. It is designed for students who have little or no production experience. Assignments provide hands-on learning of the basic elements of production. From cinematography, lighting, and sound, to writing a short script and editing with Final Cut Pro, this class takes students through the production process, culminating in the completion of a 2ˆ5 minute short digital film. This course is open to Film and Media Studies majors only. Enrollment priority will be given to graduating seniors who have not completed 120A Basic Production or 117A Introduction to Screenwriting. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. This course has a non-refundable lab fee.

This course provides an historical overview of Latina/o access to, and representation in, U.S. film, television and other media, with periodic attention to developments in the current mediascape. Special emphasis will be placed on the role played by language, the "gendering" of U.S.-Latina/o stereotypes, the impact of foreign and immigration policy on mainstream portrayals, community-rooted media initiatives, and the lasting contributions of producers, performers, screenwriters, directors, critics, and audience members to the screen agency and
enfranchisement of Latinas/os as a regionally and socially diverse group. A range of genres and technical formats will be analyzed, including documentary and experimental film, video and digital art. Students will gain exposure to critical vocabulary linked to film and media analysis, and will become familiar with recurring patterns in, and challenges facing, Latina/o audiovisual representation, as well as the creative profiles of leading directors, performers, and media hosts.

This course considers popular representations of and cultural productions by Asian Pacific Americans and Asians in the Americas from the late 19th century to the present. Employing theories of cultural studies, queer/feminist studies, media studies, and performance studies, we will discuss vital ways to contextualize the presence of Asian/Pacific and Asian /Pacific Americans in U.S. popular culture. Popular culture mediums examined include: political cartoons, visual art, film/television, music, blogs/websites, performance art and theatre.

This course is designed to help you develop your ability to think and write about film through an analysis of heist films. Heist or caper narratives are a distinctly cinematic genre, though they only emerged in the 1950s with such films as John Hustons The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubricks The Killing. In this course we’ll consider a range of films, from international adaptations, such as Rififi, and comic capers like How to Steal a Million, to suspense dramas (Heat and Inside Man), and remakes, (Oceans Eleven). Students will write papers that draw on genre theory to first define the heist film and then analyze its meanings. This is a writing-intensive course that will include a number of writing assignments and in-class writing.

This course will explore science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's fiction as a source of inspiration for filmmakers influence and inspiration on the cinematic imagination, dealing with subcultural and countercultural revolt, drug abuse and experimentation, the Cold War security state, religious experience, pulp versus high culture. We will deal with questions of formal and social analysis and engagement in screening the films inspired by PKD's fiction and its unique visual and conceptual vocabulary. Critical readings will include Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson, Dick's fiction: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik. Films to be screened: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), Total Recall (Verhoeven), Minority Report (Spielberg), A Scanner Darkly (Linklater)

Perk up your ears, Sound and Music examines how sound technologies have changed the ways we communicate, create, and consume culture. We will consider how have audiences have learned to listen to audio, how the ways audiences use and listen to technologies impact what they hear, how technologies have changed music and sound aesthetics, and how sound impacts the meanings of moving images. To do so, we will examine the invention of telephones and the revolution of cell phones, the rise of recording and popular music, the history and aesthetics of hip hop, the use of music in marketing movies, the portability of iPods, the international phenomenon of karaoke, and the cultural contradictions of popular music.

How does an indie film get made and sold in the US? This class examines the contemporary American independent cinema: its commercial viability, themes, and aesthetics. The class will survey the films nominated for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prizes in Dramatic and Documentary sections in order to address the question: how are feature indie film projects selected, marketed, and distributed in both festival and commercial circuits? By choosing to sample most of the films officially chosen in the festival that year, the class will be able to examine both successes and failures of life after world premieres for each titles. After viewing of the film, each student will be given opportunities to conduct research on at least one of the featured titles. He or she is expected to cover grounds on its financing, budgeting, marketing strategies, and box office, and report back to the rest of the class. The class will also feature guest lectures by working professionals in the field: curators, producers, and filmmakers.

This class looks at three distinct but overlapping film cultures that uphold, redeem, or re-read critically disparaged films, from over-the-top musicals and melodramas to cheesy sci-fi movies to risque exploitation/B-film fare. This course is both an unconventional genre class which looks at films in terms of how their fans/followers have transgressively reappropriated them, and a rigorous look at how these oppositional connoisseurships of trash function as politicized strategies for marginalized communities who attempt to turn the tables on establishment culture's ideals. While similar in many ways, the devoted cult following of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the champions of camp/cult auteurs like Busby Berkeley, Ed Wood, John Waters or Russ Meyer, and the fans of Mae West, Marlene Deitrich, Greta Garbo and Star Trek, have differing cultural competences and complex relationships with these works-ranging from affectionate ridicule to parodic celebration to worshipful nostalgia. This class looks at what has been called a good taste of bad taste, considering the sensibilities which can assert, paradoxically, that a film is so awful it's good, or so serious it's funny.