Spring 2021 Film and Television Studies Course Descriptions
FT 458 A1/FT 721 A1 International Masterworks (Decker) Mon 6:30 pm to 7:45 pm & Tues 5:00 pm to 6:15 pm This course fulfills the foreign cinema requirement.
An eclectic and unsystematic survey of a small number of the supreme masterworks of international film created by some of the greatest artists of the past eighty years. The focus in on cinematic style. What does style do? Why are certain cinematic presentations highly stylized? What is the difference from realistic, representational work? We will consider the special ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling that highly stylized works of art create and devote all of our attention to the function of artistic style and form to create new experiences and ways of thinking and feeling.
FT 530 A1 Bollywood/Nollywood (Decker) Wed 4:30 pm to 7:15 pm. This course fulfills the foreign cinema requirement
This course explores how Indian, West African, and North African filmmakers have responded to their countries' colonial histories. Examining a range of films, including musicals, dramas, and action films, this course attends to politics, aesthetics, and cultural and industrial history.
FT 534 A1 Critical TV Studies (Jaramillo) Mon Wed 4:30 pm to 6:15 pm. pre-req FT 303. This course fulfills the additional tv studies requirement
Whether you want to work in the television industry or focus your research on it, your connection to it will be incomplete without a critical interrogation of its history and processes. TV industry studies is a scholarly reading and discussion-driven seminar that conceptualizes the US television industry as a complex site of negotiation between producers and audiences, labor and management, creativity and commerce, and government and corporations. Whereas other television studies courses might privilege the intricacies at work within specific programs or genres, this class asks students to locate those programs within the broader context of a capitalist media system.
FT 541 A1 TV Genres (Howell) Mon Wed 2:30 pm to 4:15 pm. pre-req FT 303. This course fulfills the additional tv studies requirement
This class uses fan studies and genre studies approaches to critically analyze the ways that fan practices have shaped and been shaped by the television industry as well as how fans have used their position to influence the norms of television. We will focus on genres with extremely active and integral fandoms and how they are similar or distinct: science fiction/fantasy, melodrama/soap operas, and sports.
FT 543 A1 TV Comedy (Jaramillo) Mon Wed 12:20 pm to 2:05 pm. This course fulfills the additional tv studies requirement
The American television situation comedy has been an enormously popular and powerful art form. This course traces the growth of the sitcom genre from the beginnings in the early 1950's up to the present time and analyzes how American life has been influenced by it. We look at how sitcoms affected popular perception of working class, race, ethnicity, idealized family life and then the growth of different family structures, fantasy and war. We study how sitcoms initially portrayed women and then the emerging changes in response to the feminist movement. We analyze Norman Lear's series which talked about the real things Americans were saying but in the privacy of their homes and the revolution that his series created. Finally we examine anti-family satire and take a close look at contemporary single life, both straight and gay.
FT 546 A1 New German Cinema (Grundmann) Thur 3:30 pm to 7:15 pm. This course fulfills the foreign cinema requirement
This course surveys German cinema from the post-World War II period to the present. We will use the concept of national cinema as a way of investigating the relationship between films and various constructs of "the nation" through specific time periods, including the 1950s period of West German economic reconstruction, the 1960s and 70s rebellion of West German "New Wave" filmmakers against Papa's Kino (Daddy's cinema), the development of film in East Germany during the same period, the impact of German reunification on the film industry, and the cinema of a reunified Germany in relation to transnationalism and globalization. Subject areas include Germany's Nazi past and the Holocaust, capitalism vs. East German communism, art cinema vs. commercial cinema, the relationship to the U.S., feminist and queer cinema, and multiculturalism. Directors include Helmut Käutner, Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, Werner Schroeter, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Margarete von Trotta, Wolfgang Petersen, Valeska Griesebach, Angela Schanelec, and Christian Petzold.
FT 554 A1 UK Costume Drama (Decker) Tues 11:00 am to 12:15 am & Fri 10:10 am to 11:5 am. Pre- req FT 250 Fulfills foreign cinema requirement.
Long before ITV's Downton Abbey and Netflix's The Crown became smashing successes, British cinema was permeated by a concern with the historical representation of British history and heritage -- as well as elaborate costumes, lush mise-en-scène, and high drama. This discussion- heavy class explores the history of British costume dramas, as well as theories about heritage cinema, costume drama, and film melodrama.
FT 554 B1 Contemporary American Film (Grundmann) Tues 6:30 pm to 9:15 pm & Thur 11:00 am to 1:15 pm
This course surveys American cinema history from 1960 to the present. Topics include the demise of the old studio system and the rise of independent film in the 1960s, the New Hollywood of the late 60s/early 70s, the emergence of the blockbuster in the 70s, the creation of the studio franchise in the 80s and its evolution into contemporary tentpole films, Reagan entertainment, as well as cinema and 9/11. The course also covers developments in independent film including the LA Filmmakers Rebellion in the 1970s, Spike Lee and black independent film since the 1980s, and independent women filmmakers. Genres include the social satire, the revisionist western, the renaissance of the woman's film, the male weepie, teen pics and horror films, biopics and superhero films. Directors we discuss through feature screenings or excerpts include Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Clarke, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Julie Dash, Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling, Nancy Meyers, Kimberly Pierce, Kelly Reichardt, Gus van Sant, Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron, P.T. Anderson, and the Coen Brothers.
FT 554 C1 Stardom (Burr) Thur 12:30-3:15 meets with JO 502
This class will train students to think of stardom as a field of critical engagement and cultural play. The semester will consist of two parts. In the first part, we will discuss the history of film stardom from the silent era to the 21st century, establishing key personality and social types, tracing the rise and fall of the cinematic celebrity, and discussing the move from movie screen to TV screen to computer screen as stardom – or the social construct we call by that name – comes within the grasp of the audience. In the second half, students will learn about and start to o master the different practical journalistic approaches to writing about stardom and fame.
FT 559 A1 American Indie Cinema 4- Mumblecore: The Voices of the New Generation (Carney) Tues Thurs 1:30 pm to 3:15 pm. No pre-requisites and no permission required.
The course comprises one unit of a four-semester survey (each part of which is free-standing and may be taken separately and independently of each other or in any order) of the major achievements of the most important artistic movement of the last sixty years in American film— the independent feature filmmaking movement, in which American narrative filmmakers broke away from the financial, bureaucratic, and (most importantly) imaginative influence of Hollywood values and entertainment story-telling methods to create a series of low-tech, low- budget, personal-expression films. This semester will focus on the contemporary generation that has been referred to by reviewers as “mumblecore” filmmakers. The past fifteen years have seen the birth and development of a new kind of ultra-low-budget DIY filmmaking created by filmmakers in their 20s and 30s who write, shoot, edit, and often act in their own movies. The result is a series of works that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary sexual and social mores and communicate what it is to be young, restless, eager, and uncertain in the world as we actually experience it today. Since women have made some of the best and most important of these films, screenings will include many female filmmakers. No pre-requisites and no permission required.
FT 567 A1 Film Styles (Carney) Tues Thurs 11:15 am to 12:45 pm No pre-requisites and no permission required.
The style of a stylized film is its strangest, most mysterious, and, often, most wonderful quality. Style begins where realism and representation end. It is all those things a film can do to reprogram our brains that have nothing to do with putting the world we see and hear in our ordinary lives on screen. It involves narrative distortions, weird photographic, editorial, and acoustic effects, strange events, and eccentric characters—all in the service of attempting to alter our definition of “reality.” We will look at some of the most bizarre movies ever made, along with a few apparently (but only apparently) “normal” films that have more insidious designs on our consciousnesses, that aspire to change our understandings of experience in subtler ways.