Cinema and Media Studies Courses

CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES COURSES

AY 2016 - 2017

Autumn 2016

C LIT 520 Methods & Issues in Cinema J. Bean Studies This course is designed to give graduate students a basic grounding in the theory, history and criticism of cinema and media studies, and introduce them to central debates, topics, and methods in the field. The central objectives of the course include familiarizing class participants with the:

*theories most germane to film and media critics since the early 20th century *methods and problems of textual analysis and interpretation of films *representative cannon of films and related media texts from diverse historical periods *historical and cultural paradigms as they relate to film and media studies (mass culture/modernity/nationalism/etc.) *pedagogical techniques specific to film and media studies

To achieve these goals, all class members will offer a 20-minute “pedagogical presentation” during the quarter in order to practice teaching film analysis; class members also will write several responses to reading materials and to films in order to facilitate weekly seminar discussions, and will participate in a “course conference” at the end of the quarter to practice techniques for professional panel presentations.

C LIT 597 Special Topics in Cinema and Sinophone Culture in the Y. Braester Media Studies Eighties The 1980s marked a transitional and transformative period in Sinophone culture. The seminar explores major discursive shifts, including:

- The changing definitions of culture and realignement of intellectuals vis-à-vis popular culture. - The reassessment of past cultural events, at the end of Mao and Chiang dictatorships and in anticipation of the Hong Kong handover. - The reintroduction of the PRRC as a key player in the Sinophone sphere and subsequent responses. - Trends in film culture: the rise of the Fourth and Fifth generations, New Taiwan Cinema and “the death of New Cinema”, the Hong Kong New Wave

In addition, the seminar will address methodological questions about the cross-cultural historical study and the influence of our present perspective, as the generation born in the 1980s is dominating the cultural scene.

Winter 2017

CMS Special L. Mercer 597 Topics in Cinema and Media Studies This course examines the construction of the Spanish nation in the context of cinematic production stretching from the silent era to the present day. We will interrogate common assumptions regarding Spain’s uneven experience of modernity, at the same time as we consider and complicate the canonical periodization of Spanish cinema. Topics will include: “Las dos Españas, or the two Spains; childhood and the Franco dictatorship; the decadence of machismo; the culture of crisis; and Spanish responses to immigration and globalization.

CMS Special Film and the S. Mahadevan 597 Topics in Photographic Cinema Imaginary and Media Studies This cross-disciplinary seminar introduces students to the theories, histories and creative practices that link film and photography. To what extent has the photographic imaginary influenced portraiture, reenactments, or the tableau in the cinema? In what instances have the overlaps between film and photography informed visual ethnography? Is the opposition between stillness and movement obsolete in the digital era? What other ontologies of the moving and still image can be found in non-Western contexts? Readings will be drawn from three areas: historical studies of the two media, film and photography theory, and the ethics and the politics of representation.

Among others, we will read Marta Braun, Serge Gruzinsky, Seigfried Kracauer, Catherine Russell, and WJT Mitchell. We will watch films by Atom Egoyan, Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Errol Morris, among others, as well as artists working across film and photography.

Spring 2017

CMS 597 Special Topics in Cinema and Classical Hollywood Cinema J. Tweedie Media Studies

CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES COURSES

AY 2015 - 2016

Autumn 2015

C LIT 597 Special Topics in Cinema and Y. Braester Media Studies

Winter 2016

Spring 2016

C LIT 597 Special Studies in Cinema & Comparative Film Studies S. Mahadevan Media This course offers an introduction to comparative film studies as a project and approach to film and media history, theory and aesthetics. The global circulation of cinema from its earliest days has sustained an interest in cinema's broad currency in diverse locations. We will survey these transnationally oriented discussions. We also wish to go further in this course. Do cinemas need to be connected through geography or history to be comparable? What about comparisons across vast stretches of time? Or across media and performance spaces? Comparative perspectives can prioritize similar causal processes; identify historical and social connections that may not have been readily apparent; discover contingencies and differences in ostensibly similar cases; and question ontological sureties about a medium.

Topic considered include:

- the staggered historical emergence of the cinema in various parts of the world, and its relevance for comparative film history. - The encounters between various stylistic movements such as Italian neo-realism and the left cultural avant-garde in India; or the French New Wave and the New Waves of the cinemas of East Asia. - The emergence of a Third Cinema across Latin America as an aesthetics of resistance. - the transnational forces that shape conceptions of national cinema, such as piracy, or "art cinema" as a global commodity, or auteurism as a mode of film production.

- the functions of modes of representation and dramaturgy such as realism and melodrama in various locations.

We will read texts drawn from film studies (focusing for instance on film history, genre theory, national cinema paradigms, close textual analysis). Readings will also more generally be drawn from comparative history, globalization theory, literary theory and art history. Some familiarity with film vocabulary and analysis would be helpful but not essential. Students should expect to watch at least two movies a week. Films cover the gamut, from the popular cinemas of Hollywood and Bollywood to art cinemas to experimental and avant-garde impulses. Interdisciplinary engagement is welcome!

Assignments will include weekly reading summaries and a final research paper.

CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES COURSES

AY 2014 - 2015

Autumn 2014

C LIT 497 Special Topics in Disability in Russian Cinema J. Alaniz Cinema Studies DISABILITY IN FILM

What is “disability”? What is “health”? What is “normal”? What is a “body”? The course will first examine how these questions have historically been answered in American culture. We will discuss And critique disability theory, the disability rights and movements and the representation of the disabled. Armed with these “western” concepts and insights, we then turn our attention to Russia and its cultural productions involving diability (i.e., works about the disabled or made by disabled artists), focusing on 19th and 20th century literature/art. Among our topics: The grotesque, the “holy fool”, the “cult of suffering.” What role have paganism, orthodox Christianity, nationalism, communism and World War II played in Russia’s answers to our initial questions? WE conclude with a consideration of the disabled in late/post-Soviet Russia.

C LIT 520 Methods & Issues in Cinema J. Tweedie Studies This course is designed to give graduate students a basic grounding in the theory, history and criticism of cinema and media studies, and introduce them to central debates, topics, and methods in the field. The central objectives of the course include familiarizing class participants with the:

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Eco-cinema: Documenting J. Bean Modern Culture in Theory & Practice The catastrophic effects of modern culture on our bodies and the environment have become the subject of a 21st century film and media movement ranging from Showtime sponsored television programs to independent filmmakers who take their own bodies as “visible evidence” of environmental and physical crisis. During the first half of the quarter we will scrutinize and assess this late 20th and early 21st century film movement. During the second half of the course, each member of the class will produce a short documentary film of his/her own. You will be expected to engage in the rigorous research (often archival) practices necessary to interview subjects and prepare a “visual argument,” and you will learn to write a short non-fiction script that will be shot and edited in a five week period. SCAND 590 Scand Special Topics Cinema, Migration and the A.Wallgren Making of the Other in Modern Sweden Cinema, Migration and the Making of the Other in Modern Sweden, will be team-taught by visiting professors Ann-Kristin Wallengren and Hans Wallengren (both from Lund University, Sweden), who are at the UW in Autumn Quarter as the American Scandinavian Foundation's Visiting Lecturers for 2014-2015. This course surveys the theme of Swedish Others from 1910s Hollywood (for example, Greta Garbo) to contemporary Swedish cinema (for example, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), as well as the modern multicultural Sweden and films in relation to xenophobia and right-wing extremist parties. Graduate students may also register for the course as SCAND 590.

Winter 2015

C LIT 423 East European Film East European Cinema in G. Crnkovic Comparative Perspective This course focuses on East European directors who moved to the “West” (e.g., Miloš Forman, Roman Polanski, Dušan Makavejev, Agnieszka Holland), on the comparison between their East European production and their American or Western European one, and on the things we can learn about these authors’ work in particular and Eastern European cinema in general from this comparative perspective. We will examine in more depth the cinema of filmmakers such as Miloš Forman, who did outstanding films in his native Czechoslovakia at the time of the so-called Czech New Wave of the late sixties, and then proceeded to make some of the most “American” Hollywood films, such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The People vs. Larry Flint, Roman Polanski, director of the Hollywood classic Chinatown and the 2003 Academy Award winner The Pianist, Agnieszka Holland, who worked in her native Poland but also in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the USA, Hungarian István Szabó, and Yugoslav Dušan Makavejev.

This course will also offer a basic survey of Eastern European film production in the post-World War II period, examining issues of film making in a non-market society, the strong presence of women directors and gender-related themes in East European cinema, the vibrant tradition of experimental and animated films, and East European film in the socialist and post-socialist eras. No prerequisites. C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Early Hollywood and American J. Bean Popular Culture An overview of the relation between films produced in the U.S. and political and ideological shifts in concepts of American national identity and cultural tensions in the years between the fin de siècle and the 1950s. Periods to be covered include the Progressive Era, the Jazz Age, the Depression, the New Deal, Populism, WWII and the onset of the Cold War. These eras will be considered relative to films produced by the mainstream industry, commonly referred to as “Hollywood” by the late 1910s and early 1920s. While the course is organized as a survey, discussions, reading materials, and assignments will concentrate on developing strategies of analysis as well as on framing new research questions.

Spring 2015 C LIT 597/ Special Studies in Cinema & Anime and Animation J. Jesty JAPAN 591 Media

C LIT 597 Special Studies in Cinema & Film and the Photographic S. Madhadevan Media Imaginary This seminar introduces students to the theories, histories and creative practices that link film and photography. To what extent has the photographic imaginary influenced portraiture, reenactments, the tableau in the cinema? In what instances have the overlaps between film and photography informed visual ethnography or produced new reflections on historiography? Is the digital still image obsolete or do still images invite new reflections on duration and the phenomenological aspects of viewing pictures and watching films? What other ontologies of the moving and still image can be found in non-Western contexts?

The readings in this seminar belong to three broad areas of inquiry that significantly overlap with each other.

The first is a survey of the historical links between photography and film that take us from late 19th century chrono-photography, to the intersection of film and photojournalism in the first half of the twentieth century, to the emergence of digital photography and its relation to film. Readings for this section include Marta Braun, Rielle Navitzky, Serge Gruzinsky, Paula Amad, Teresa Castro.

The second area focuses on photographic and film theory with reflections by modernists, critical and film theorists, filmmakers (Lewis Hine, Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Sergei Eisenstein among others) as well as more contemporary writers, including historians (Rosalind Kraus, Laura Mulvey, Annette Michelson, WJT Mitchell, Thierry de Duve, Carlo Ginzburg).

The third is an introduction to issues around the ethics and politics of representation, particularly as they pertain to photographic practices in art, political reportage and ethnography (in for instance the writing of Ariella Azoulay, Christopher Pinney, Catherine Russell, Fatima Tobing-Rony).

Films include Atom Egoyan's Calendar, Chris Marker's La Jetee, Agnes Varda's La Pointe Courte, Antonioni's L'Aventura and Blow Up, Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure, and we will also read about the work of artists such as Jeff Wall, Bill Viola, Cindy Sherman and N. Pushpamala.

This seminar and its readings cut across disciplines and is intended to be of potential interest for students in the departments of history, literature, art history, photography as well as film studies.

Written assignments will include detailed summaries of readings, and a substantial research essay. Readings will be available online and where available, books will be on reserve in the library.

Required Texts:

Beckman, Karen R, and Jean Ma. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008 Trachtenberg, Alan, and Amy W. Meyers. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 2000 Campany, David. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion, 2008 AY 2013-2014

Autumn 2013

C LIT 497 Special Topics in East European Animation J. Alaniz Cinema Studies This course examines the origins and development of animated film in Russia and the former Soviet sphere (especially Czechoslovakia, Poland and Estonia). Long considered a children’s medium, animation served as a vehicle for state propaganda but also – throughout its history in these closed, authoritarian societies – for politicized and even critical expression. More broadly, the course examines how popular culture interacts, reinforces and at times resists hegemonic structures. Artists covered include Wladislaw Starewicz, Nikolai Khodataev, Jan Švankmajer, Yurii Norstein, Fyodor Khitruk, Vyacheslav Kotenochkin and Yurii Kulakov. All films and readings in English translation.

In order to achieve these goals, this seminar meets twice a week. One session each week will be devoted primarily to discussion of theoretical, methodological and historical readings. The second weekly session will be devoted primarily to screening the “feature” film(s) of the week, although the screening session will often begin with a series of clips or excerpts from an array of films, and these presentations will foster techniques for assessing and teaching film’s many formal and stylistic registers: editing, cinematography, sound, mise-en-scene, etc, in a historical context. Throughout the quarter, your reading materials will mention films or media products that we do not have the opportunity to watch together. I encourage you to view as many of these titles on your own as time allows, so as to engage more specifically with the theories under discussion, and to broaden your knowledge of film and media history more generally.

Since another of our overarching goals is to encourage a professional relationship to the field of cinema and media studies, the quarter will end (last week of class) with a "course conference" in which each member will present a 20-minute presentation of their research to that point. Presentations will be organized into respective panels, and q&a will follow each respective panel. Participants will then revise and expand their conference paper for the final seminar paper. Winter 2014

C LIT 423 East European Film East European Cinema in G. Crnkovic Comparative Perspective This course focuses on East European directors who moved to the “West” (e.g., Miloš Forman, Roman Polanski, Dušan Makavejev, Agnieszka Holland, Istvan Szabo), on the comparison between their East European production and their American or Western European one, and on the things we can learn about these authors’ work in particular and Eastern European cinema in general from this comparative perspective. We will examine in more depth the cinema of filmmakers such as Miloš Forman, who did outstanding films in his native Czechoslovakia at the time of the so-called Czech New Wave of the late sixties, and then proceeded to make some of the most “American” Hollywood films, such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The People vs. Larry Flint, Roman Polanski, director of the Hollywood classic Chinatown and the 2003 Academy Award winner The Pianist, Agnieszka Holland, who worked in her native Poland but also in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the USA, Hungarian István Szabó, and Yugoslav Dušan Makavejev.

This course will also offer a basic brief survey of Eastern European film production in the post-World War II period, examining issues of film making in a non-market society, the strong presence of women directors and gender-related themes in East European cinema, the vibrant tradition of experimental and animated films, and East European film in the socialist and post-socialist eras.

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Opera & Film E. Ames/J. Brown This course explores the rich interrelations between film and opera: how opera contributes to the shape, plots, and visual luxury of film, the ambiguous status of both as high and low culture, the competition between image and voice in both media, the relations of time and space in both. In addition to watching videos of operas directed for the camera as well as films based on opera, we will attend two live performances at the Seattle Opera, one Metropolitan live broadcast in HD, and backstage tours at Seattle Opera. We will also reflect on the historical relations of opera, film, and cartoon animation.

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Special Topics in CMS: The Y. Braester Politics of Memory in Post- socialist Chinese Literature, Film, and Art How have modern Chinese writers, film directors, and painters imagined personal and collective memory? What has been the environment of political and intellectual debates in which they are working? How have the different media dealt with the topic of memory? How has scholarship addressed these concerns? The course explores these questions while providing a survey of contemporary scholarship in China studies and memory studies.

Knowledge of Chinese is not required, although the class is expected to be composed mostly of students who know Chinese. Based on language skills, students will be asked to read the materials in English, Chinese, or both. C LIT 596 / Special Studies in Comp Lit Japanese Cinema J. Jesty JAPAN 590 This seminar will introduce Japanese film, both as a body of film and as a field of study. It is designed to serve the needs of graduate students in both cinema studies and Japanese studies. It will be divided into 3 units, approximately 3 weeks each. The first unit will cover the “classics” of Japanese cinema, pairing them with interpretive traditions from the 1960s and 70s which emphasized culturally-inflected mise-en-scene criticism, along with latter-day critics of that tradition. The second unit will focus on avant-garde and political film of the 1960s and its connection with political modernist criticism. The third unit will focus on anime, introducing both textual approaching to animation and multi-media approaches to the global phenomenon of anime. No prerequisites, no Japanese required.

Spring 2014

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Special Topics in CMS: J. Tweedie Readings in Film and Media Studies This course will provide an introduction to contemporary media studies. Within this broad and expanding field, we will focus in particular on the relationship between historical and emerging media forms or what Siegfried Zielinski calls the “deep time of the media.” Readings may include work by Zielinski, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jonathan Crary, Richard Dienst, Alexander Galloway, Lisa Gitelman, Erkki Huhtamo, Henry Jenkins, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, Carolyn Marvin, Anna McCarthy, Jussi Parikka, Lynn Spigel, Tiziana Terranova, and Raymond Williams. Media texts will focus primarily on films showing at the Seattle International Film Festival and other work in theaters or on screens now. MUHST Seminar in Music Since 1890 The Film Music of Bernard 510 Herrman Bernard Herrmann was perhaps the finest of Hollywood composers, and he pioneered a new role for the film composer beyond the confines of the studio system. We will explore his wide-ranging output by studying the scores to Citizen Kane, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Taxi Driver. Weekly readings will not only focus on Herrmann's music, but will also delve into theories of film music and such topics as semiotics, the "gaze," and auteur cinema. There will be two research papers, the second to be presented in class. AY 2012-2013

Autumn 2012

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Chinese Cinema Y. Braester The seminar is designed as a crash course for graduate students who wish to get familiar with the discipline of Chinese cinema, for future research and teaching, and provides an introduction to the history, critical practices and current scholarship of Chinese film.

Class discussions will be based on a weekly assignment of one book and two films. Topics covered include: early cinema; the Cultural Revolution; the Fifth Generation; Urban Cinema; Documentary; Taiwanese cinema; Hong Kong cinema. Winter 2013

C LIT 497 Special Topics in Early Russian and Soviet Film G. Diment Cinema Studies The course will examine early Jewish films (in Yiddish or Russian) produced in tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and Poland in the span of 25 years, from the very beginning of silent film to the early years of sound film, from the twilight years of Russian monarchy (and the notorious Pale of Settlement) through Bolshevik Revolustion and up to the spread of Hitlerism in Europe. No prerequisites. All reading and discussions will be in English. All films have English intertitles or subtitles.

Required Books (UBookstore): 1. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories 2. Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl & Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son 3. Michael Alexander. Jazz Age Jews 4. S. An-ski. The Dybbuk 5. Isaac Babel. Red Cavalry and Other Stories 6. Walter Benjamin. Moscow Diary 7. Jeffrey Veidlinger. The Moscow State Jewish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage 8. Robert Wienberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Homeland.

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit German Documentary in a E. Ames Global Context A survey of the genre and the particular forms it has taken in Germany from 1895 to the present, this course will focus on key examples, including cinematic precursors and experimental forms as well as authored films by Walter Ruttmann, Leni Riefenstahl, Romuald Karmakar, Harun Farocki, and Werner Herzog. These examples will in turn be compared with films from Britain, France, Denmark, Japan, Israel, the US, and the USSR. Materials to be discussed will include (but are not restricted to): actualities, travelogues, avant-garde films, Kulturfilme, party-rally films, Holocaust documentaries, long-term studies, observational films (direct cinema and cinéma vérité), and essay films. While the course is organized as a survey, discussions and assignments will concentrate on developing strategies of formal analysis as well as on framing new research questions. Documentary is not a fiction like (or unlike) any other. It has a history of its own, and one that is worth exploring--especially as documentary forms become increasingly central to media cultures across the board. In English. COM 519 Visual Cultural Studies R. Joseph Methods At the center of visual cultural studies is what is often called a “visual event.” A visual event encompasses the entire network of subjects and institutions which make a visual image possible and meaningful. The phrase is useful because it describes not only a static image but the production, transmission, and reception of that image. This course will give students multiple methods to understand visual meaning. We will examine how we learn to interpret images, the role of technology, in the broadest sense of the word, in producing and disseminating those images, and how we account for context in understanding the impact of those images.

Methods and Theories The relatively new field of visual culture was formed in response to what many felt was a limiting disciplinary distinction between different kinds of visual analysis. As a result, what we might now term as visual culture studies draws from multiple fields including art history, comparative literature, women and gender studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and, of course, communication. Rather than impose a false coherence to the field, then, this course will introduce students to the heterogeneity of both the object studied and the methodological approaches to those objects.

The course will be organized around two axes, the first is genre (fine art, photography, film, cyberspace) and the second is interpretive approach (semiotics, marxism, psychology, feminism, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies). Students will also develop their own writing skills by examining the structure of the arguments they read. How do the critic’s frame their topic? How do they justify their approach? What sorts of evidence do they use? How effective is their argument? For each of the two week segments, students will study various approach to these forms of visual culture, discuss why certain methods have become dominant, explore alternative methods, and apply a method. Students will then choose a particular method or combination of methods for a final extended analysis due at the end of class.

Course Objectives By the end of this course you should be able to:

 Identify several major methodological approaches to visual cultural analysis  Demonstrate your familiarity with the fundamental theories used in the field  Analyze a visual event using multiple methods  Develop your own argument and present it in written and oral form  Research and understand the issues in specific subfields of visual culture on your own

Spring 2013

C LIT 497 Special Topics in Contemporary Russian Cinema J. Alaniz Cinema Studies This course examines the origins and development of animated film in Russia and the former Soviet sphere(especially Czechoslovakia, Poland and Estonia). Long considered a children’s medium, animation served as a vehicle for state propaganda but also – throughout its history in these closed, authoritarian societies – for politicized and even critical expression. More broadly, the course examines how popular culture interacts, reinforces and at times resists hegemonic structures. Artists covered include Wladislaw Starewicz, Nikolai Khodataev, Jan Švankmajer, Yurii Norstein, Fyodor Khitruk, Vyacheslav Kotenochkin and Yurii Kulakov. All films and readings in English translation. C LIT 596 A Special Studies in Comp Lit Contemporary Film Theory J. Tweedie This course will focus on three key topics in contemporary film and media theory. The first section of the course will examine the recent revival of interest in the relationship between philosophy and cinema. Reading may include work by Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Zizek. A second section will consider the role of archives and theories of the archive in recent cinema and media studies, with emphasis on both the collection and preservation of film and other images (that is, an archive viewed in the more technical sense of the term) and the documentary quality of moving images (that is, film and media serving as a form of historical object and testimony, as an archive in another sense). A third section will consider the challenges posed by new media to film studies, to philosophy, and to our understanding of the archive. Within all of these sections, the overarching goal of the course will be to study the extremes of film studies, from the abstractions of philosophy to the materiality of the archive and production conditions, and to introduce some of the diverse methods and perspectives at work in the discipline today. AY 2011-2012

Autumn 2011

C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Detective Narrative in Latin C. Steele America: Novel into Film An overview of the development of the detective novel in Mexico and Argentina, along with a comparison of film adaptations of the novels in question. We will examine the basic tenets of the detective genre and of film adaptations of literature, and will analyze how Mexican and Argentine authors and directors have adapted the U.S. hard-boiled crime novel to comment on Latin American society at various sociopolitical junctures over the past half century. The crimes addressed range from serial murders to political conspiracies and repression of dissidents; the authors‘ approaches combine elements of psychoanalysis, Marxism, anti-imperialism, feminism, and the critique of neoliberalism. C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Contemporary Film Theory L. Mercer This course will give students a theoretical grounding in the development of Spanish film history and familiarize them with major trends in Spanish cinema, from the silent era to the globalized present. We will focus particularly on the uneven processes of modernization that have affected Spanish filmmaking. Included in the course are films by directors such as Segundo de Chomon, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Carlos Saura, Pedro Almodovar, Iciar Bollain, and Juan Jose Bigas Luna.

Winter 2012

C LIT 497 Special Topics in Russian Jewish Film G. Diment Cinema Studies The course will examine early Jewish films (in Yiddish or Russian) produced in tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and Poland in the span of 25 years, from the very beginnings of silent film to the early years of sound film, from the twilight years of Russian monarchy (and the notorious Pale of Settlement) through Bolshevik Revolution and up to the spread of Hitlerism in Europe. No prerequisites. All readings and discussions will be in English. All films have English intertitles or subtitles. C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Cinephilia: Cinematic Y. Braester Experience in Historical Context Histories of Cinema in the Digital Age How has the history of film been rewritten in the past twenty years, especially through the cinematic medium itself? To what extent are these new histories the result of new technology — shooting in Digital Video, editing on computers distribution on VHS/VCD/DVD and P2P, and critical reception through online reviews and the blogosphere? To what extent is it because of political and ideological changes — the advent of globalization, the turn to post-socialism, and the rise of neoliberalism? To inquire into these questions, we will examine closely a number of films directly interested in the history of film, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Dan Geva’s Description of a Memory, Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn and the omnibus film To Each His Cinema. The seminar is designed to coach graduate students through the various stages of a research project during the term.

Spring 2012

C LIT 574 Special Studies in Comp Lit Scandinavian Auteurs A. Nestingen Since the 1960s, auteur filmmaking has predominated as the standard of comparison in the production and reception of Scandinavian cinema. SCAND 470/570-C LIT 574 is a seminar devoted to studying notions of authorship as they are relevant to understanding Scandinavian cinema, and in particular the careers of one or two Scandinavian auteurs. Students will develop an understanding of theories of film authorship, but also develop an ability to apply their theoretical understanding to the study of Scandinavian film. In spring 2010, we will focus our studies on the films of Aki KaurismÃ¤ki and Lars von Trier, the two most important and influential Scandinavian auteurs since the 1980s. C LIT 596 Special Studies in Comp Lit Historiography J. Bean "Historiography and the Archive: Rethinking "American Cinema"

This course is, on one hand, a practicum in archival research. We will learn to utilize new digital databases, as well as microfilm and multiple reference sources, in order to facilitate the course members' experience of working with editors at the American Film Institute to write entries for the new AFI catalogue of post-1975 film. This class, in short, will be linked to the AFI affiliate network.

At the same time, this course engages with the question of what it means to "write film history," and to trace and challenge the historiographical procedures inaugurated with the discipline of history in the 19th century in Western-European culture. To that end, readings will include recent humanistic inquiries into historical "meta- narratives" (i.e. Haydn White/Michel Foucault), and will focus on how these broader reflections might enable us to reconsider the history of U.S. cinema as something other than a "global Hollywood" positioned in opposition to an aggregate of national cinemas.

Films and readings throughout the course will enable students to emerge with a broad grasp of key moments, directors, genres, and debates over American cinema, from the inception of the U.S. film industry in the early 1910s, through the flourishing of a studio-era between 1920-1960, and on to the present.