Fall Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 110 FILM & MEDIA THEORY | STAFF |
| This course critically examines many of the major directions and movements in film and media theory. Some of the various theories and theoretical approaches include: formalism, realism, auteurism, semiology, feminism, psychoanalysis, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, queer theory, genre and new media. Through these diverse approaches and concepts, we will explore questions about the aesthetic, psychological, social, and political dimensions of film and media. We will also focus on our own relationship to theory, on how we do critical, theoretical analysis, and its efficacy and utility for our individual projects and purposes. This class requires close reading of theoretical texts and close visual analysis of media objects, both serving as the foundations for our seminar discussions. The class also requires consistent, weekly writing practices that exercise a student’s ability to analyze and mobilize theoretical arguments in written form. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 130 BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT | SCHMITT, M |
| This course critically examines the history and memory of the Black Freedom Movement in film and television. In the first half of the quarter, we will look at television and film portrayals of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements during their own historical moment. In the second half of the quarter, we will turn to the ways in which these movements are remembered in TV and film from the late 1980s until the present. The specific media texts we examine will include mainstream narrative film, television news documentary, archival news footage, television sitcom, art house film, public television programming, and independent documentary. The course will require close readings of primary and secondary written sources and close visual analysis of media texts. There will be short, writing assignments that exercise a student’s ability to process and develop creative and critical arguments about the course materials. Towards the end of the quarter, there will be opportunities to develop and articulate these skills through creative audio/visual projects. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 192 DIRECTING NARRATIVE | RONY, F. |
| This course is devoted to current topics in advanced film production. Topics addressed vary each quarter. Maybe repeated for credit as topics vary. This quarter special topic is directing and producing the narrative film. As film and video are collaborative media, students form production groups and ultimately produce final 6-10 minute film projects. The prerequisites for this course are FLM&MDA 85A, and FLM&MDA 120A. Course Requirements: Prompt attendance and participation at all classes, completion of all readings, message board writing assignments due every week at 12pm on the Friday before class, three assignments and three short papers, final digital film project due on the last day of classes. If you have more than two unexcused absences you will fail the class. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 160 JAPANESE CINEMA | PROVENCHER, K. |
| This course will introduce students to Japanese film history and to some of the most significant works of Japanese cinema. Along with France and the United States, Japan has one of the longest histories of film, dating back to the 19th century. With this course, we will gain an understanding of Japanese film as both “art” and “entertainment,” and to consider the range of works and audiences for Japanese film both inside and outside Japan. We will look at how the industry developed in the early 20th century, and how it changed after World War II to become a powerful force in international cinema. From there, we look at the industry's adjustment to television, video, and digital formats, and its international “breakout” New Wave movements of the 1960s-1970s and the 1990s-2000s. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 145 CENSORSHIP | PERLMAN, A. |
| Who should decide which voices, perspectives, images, and narratives belong in the public sphere? Should other social goals – the protection of children, gender equality, racial justice, promotion of public health, the right to privacy – trump free speech protections? What is the proper role of the government, media companies, and the public in determining what should or should not be said, seen, or heard? This class will examine these questions by exploring contemporary debates about media and censorship. Topics we will discuss may include: hate speech and social media platforms; network neutrality; indecency, obscenity, and pornography; algorithms and online search engines; the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten; intellectual property law and its impact on free expression. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 130 BRUCE LEE | MIMURA, G. |
| Bruce Lee was a martial artist, actor, teacher, pop philosopher, and one of the most dynamic superstars of the late-twentieth century. Supremely confident, intensely narcissistic, Lee was a consummate performer on-screen and in everyday life: his transnational experiences became the stage for a richly postmodern, postcolonial identity. Starring in only four (or five) martial arts films, he nonetheless helped to transform two film industries, extend the reach of cinema as an international medium, and inspire and empower the less powerful throughout the world. Since his untimely death in 1973, Lee’s larger-than-life persona has proliferated and taken on new meanings, achieving the stature of a truly global icon. This course will examine Bruce Lee’s life and career in the contexts of the Hollywood and Hong Kong industries of the 1960s–70s, and track his influence in the history of cinema and other media. We will screen enhanced, subtitled editions of the Chinese releases of his Hong Kong films. It will also situate his work and identity––Hong Kong native, diasporic Chinese, Asian American––in relation to the social, cultural, political, and economic changes taking place in the United States and East Asia broadly. As a class, we will assess the significance and meaning of Bruce Lee’s legacy today. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 112 THE WESTERN | MIMURA, G. |
| This course will introduce the formal features, thematic elements and historical development of the Western as a key American genre. The first half will focus on “classical” examples that establish the genre’s codes and conventions. The second half will examine “revisionist” Westerns from the 1960s Spaghetti Western through its more contemporary, even “postmodern” expressions. More broadly, we will examine the Western and representations of the American West for their cultural historical and mythical resonances. What does the “American West” signify? How and why has it endured? Whose story does it tell? Toward this end, the course will question the ambivalent statuses of gender, sexuality, race, and class––particularly of women, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans as subjects and objects in the Western and its cultural imaginary. All required screenings and readings will be available via Canvas and Google Drive. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 190 CAMP CULT TRASH | LIM, F. |
| 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 risqué exploitation/B-film fare. This course is both an unconventional genre class that 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 and Star Trek, the champions of camp/cult auteurs like Busby Berkeley and Ed Wood, and the fans of Mae West, Marlene Deitrich, Greta Garbo 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.” | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 139W WRITING ON FILM&MDA | LIM, F. |
| Writing on Film and Media: VFX One of the main goals of this course is to familiarize students with critical approaches to digital visual effects (VFX) in cinema. Students will learn to recognize and analyze contemporary visual effects as well as historical alternatives to this norm, such as practical special effects. This course is built on the premise that critical analysis of visual effects – which have become ubiquitous and naturalized in contemporary Hollywood cinema as well as independent alternatives to this norm –is a key component of digital visual literacy in general and film and media studies in particular. The class explores the following issues: perceptual realism; acting and performance in digital cinema; changes to the roles of cinematographer and visual effects supervisor as a result of the contemporary shift to a digital workflow; and the impact of the globalizing VFX industry on VFX artists themselves. Another central aim of the course is to equip students with skills that are key to successful writing on film: taking notes, summarizing and synthesizing sources, developing interpretive claims, and outlining and revising paper drafts. The various short writing assignments are designed to build towards the final paper while honing these skills. The prerequisites for this course are Flm&Mda 85A and Flm&Mda 101A as well as satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 139W WRITING ON FILM&MDA | JOHNSON, V. |
| Writing on Film and Media: Sports Media How do we write about sports, as Film and Media Studies scholars? What are the key questions we should ask when we write about sports media? What is sports media (generically, textually, socially)? This writing-intensive course allows close examination and application of different approaches to thinking and writing critically about and conducting research regarding sports media. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 101C CONTEMPORARY ERA | HILDERBRAND, L. |
| 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 introduce international film movements and styles between the end of the 1960s and the present. We will address viewings with the following questions in mind: How do these films contribute to various Histories of Cinema (eg., international film history, the history of national film movements, the history of film style, the history of film marketing, the history of technology)?, Through what cinematic means do these films depict historical periods, documentary, fiction, fictional documentaries?, In what ways do these films conform to and diverge from traditional US cinematic conventions, such as editing, lighting, mise-en-scene, characterization?, and What are the modes of narration employed in these films, what stories do they tell, and how do they tell them? Course requirements include prompt attendance and participation, assignments, midterm exam, final exam. The prerequsites for this course are FLM&MDA 85A and 101B. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 110 FILM & MEDIA THEORY | HILDERBRAND, L. |
| 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 digital media has suggested new text-technology-user relationships. This class focuses on close reading of a small number of challenging texts. It will be taught in a seminar format, which relies upon student participation and collaborative learning more than professor lecturing. Students will need to do the reading and participate in each class session in order to pass the course. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 162 CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD | HATCH, K. |
| From the early 1920s through the 1960s, American cinema was dominated by a handful of movie studios, an oligopoly so powerful that its practices shaped film production around the world. By the 1920s, these studios had developed a distinctive style that has come to be known as the “classical” Hollywood style. Classical Hollywood was built around the ideal of standardization, and the studios operated like factories. Yet some of the most celebrated films in cinema history were produced within this system. In this class, we will focus on films from the 1930s and 1940s to consider why the artistry of these films was attributed to the “genius” of the studio system, whether films of the period really should be described as “classical,” and the ways in which Hollywood films of this period spoke to an international mass market during a period of rapid social, cultural, and political change. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 85A INTRO FILM ANALYSIS | HATCH, K. |
| 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 cinema's debts to series photography, the course concentrates on film form, teaching students to attentively analyze films in relation to mise-en-scène, 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. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 117A INTRO SCREENWRITING | CARTIER, M. |
| 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. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 120A BASIC PRODUCTION | CANE, E. |
| This course introduces the fundamentals of film production using digital video. Assignments provide hands-on learning of the basic elements of filmmaking. From cinematography, lighting, and sound, to writing a short script and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro, this class takes students through the production process, culminating in the completion a 3 to 5 minute short digital film. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A. | ||
| FLM&MDA (F19) | 120A BASIC PRODUCTION | CANE, E. |
| This course introduces the fundamentals of film production using digital video. Assignments provide hands-on learning of the basic elements of filmmaking. From cinematography, lighting, and sound, to writing a short script and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro, this class takes students through the production process, culminating in the completion a 3 to 5 minute short digital film. Students enrolled in this class may use University owned equipment and are financially responsible for the University equipment on loan to them. The prerequisite for this course is FLM&MDA 85A. | ||