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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
An advanced course exploring the creative and technical aspects of video production. Students sharpen their knowledge of cameras, directing, lighting, sound recording, nonlinear systems, and narrative structures. In addition to acquiring a theoretical understanding of the production process, students gain practical experience by producing, outside of class time, a short project reflecting their visual and conceptual maturity. Prerequisite: Film 230 (Moving Images and Sound) or permission of the instructor.
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3.00 Credits
In parallel with an overview of various documentary genres, ranging from the personal, the poetic, the agitprop, and cinema verité, this course offers students the opportunity to produce a short documentary piece on the topic of their choosing. Aesthetic and ethical issues are explored by considering the overall methodology in terms of subjectivity, content, structure, and the possible usage of music and/or voice-over. For the sake of completing the project in time, it is recommended that students be familiar with the subject matter of their investigation, before taking the course. Prerequisite: Film 230 (Moving Images and Sound) or permission of the instructor.
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3.00 Credits
The cinema took more than 30 years to emerge with fully synchronized sounds. Since then, sound and picture have continued to be more and more integrated and interdependent. Current music video artists such as Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham constitute only one expression of that desire to merge image and sound. Earlier, many explorers such as Oskar Fischinger, Peter Kubelka, and Norman McLaren conceived films in which images and sounds surprise the viewer. In the process of producing similarly challenging four- to five-minute video pieces, we examine how synesthesia in the arts has functioned to energize the two media. A variety of software is explored in that context. Prerequisite: Film 230 (Moving Images and Sound) or permission from the instructor.
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3.00 Credits
In cinema, as in politics, Britain is caught awkwardly between America and Europe, never quite knowing how to position itself. Should it try to compete seriously with Hollywood, or develop a smaller-scale and more distinctive national cinema on the French or Swedish model? This uncertainty has commonly been seen as a weakness but it can be seen, conversely, as a strength, fostering a rich diversity and complexity both in the output overall and in the work of key British filmmakers such as Michael Powell, David Lean, and, in the first half of his career, Alfred Hitchcock. This course traces the fortunes of British cinema from its lively beginnings through a switchback history of slump and recovery, giving equal attention to the work of high-profile directors like Hitchcock and to important genres such as 1930s documentary, Ealing comedy, and Hammer horror. A continuing theme is the complex economic relationship between British cinema and Hollywood: co-productions, trade barriers, the drain of talent to Hollywood, and the intermittent success of British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral in the American market. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on films made in Japan, Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea over the past three decades. Students examine how the global/local geopolitics specific to the post-Cold War period, the passing of authoritarian regimes, the boom and bust of the Asian economy, and international film festivals have influenced the shaping of New East Asian cinemas across borders. The first section of our course investigates the ways in which historical traumas (wars, massacres, revolutions, and uprisings) have been revisited in the cinemas of Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea. What is the relationship between history and national cinema? How do such concepts as imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, guilt, and trauma figure in films shouldering the "burden of history" and representing the "unrepresentable"? The second section explores selected auteurs and stars familiar to international cinephiles, such as Zhang Yimou, Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Nagisa Oshima, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow, John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li, and Takeshi Kitano. In the process, we identify the themes, styles, genres, and ideological/cultural content of East Asian film canons in the West. The final weeks are devoted to border-crossing films such as Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet, Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together, the Korean-Japanese co-production Asako in Ruby Shoes, and the pan-Asian horror film Three Extremes, which highlight the critical concerns of diaspora, hybridity, transnationalism, and globalization. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course has two objectives. On the one hand, we watch masterpieces of European cinema, awarded at international festivals and directed by legendary names such as Milos Forman, Emir Kusturica, and Andrzej Wajda, and focus on their artistic genius. On the other hand, we study the way in which the confrontational politics of the Cold War inform these films, with a special focus on the perplexing predicament of a divided and antagonized Europe. The readings for this class emphasize our dual exploration. We work with texts dealing with both film history and its aesthetics and with broader analyses of the intellectual and political landscape of the Cold War context. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers an overview of Chinese cinemas over the 20th century, including those of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We study major trends such as the left-wing filmmaking in the 1930s, the Maoist revolutionary narratives, Taiwanese healthy realism, the New Cinemas of the three regions, and contemporary transnational productions. Major topics include urban modernity, gender formation, national and transnational cinemas within specific historical contexts. All films come with English subtitles. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
Called "the seventh art," film has a long tradition of serious popular appreciation and academic study in France. This course offers an overview of French cinema, including the origins of film (Lumière brothers, Méliès), the inventive silent period (which created such avant-garde classics as Un chien andalou), the poetic realism of the '30s, the difficulties of the war years, the post-war emphasis on historical/nationalist themes in the "tradition of quality" films, the French New Wave's attempt to create a more "cinematic" style, the effects of the political turmoil of May '68 on film culture, the "art house" reception of French films in the United States, and the broader appeal of recent hypervisual ("cinéma du look") films, such as La Femme Nikita and Amélie. While the primary focus of the course is on French cinema, we also discuss the reciprocal influences between American and French film culture, both in terms of formal influences on filmmaking and theoretical approaches to film studies. French film terms are introduced but no prior knowledge of the language is expected. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the major developments of German cinema throughout the 20th century. More specifically, this course engages with issues relating to German film culture's negotiation of popular filmmaking and art cinema, of Hollywood conventions and European avant-garde sensibilities. Topics include the political functions of German film during the Weimar, the Nazi, the post-war, and the post-wall eras; the influence of American mass culture on German film; the role of German émigrés in the classical Hollywood studio system; and the place of German cinema in present-day Europe and in our contemporary age of globalization. Special attention is given to the role of German cinema in building and questioning national identity, to the ways in which German feature films over the past hundred years have used or challenged mainstream conventions to recall the national past and envision alternative futures. Films by directors such as Murnau, Lang, Fassbinder, Herzog, Tykwer, and many others. All readings and discussions in English. May not be taken for German major or minor credit. Required screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the visual language of one of the most influential film movements of the 20th century. We concentrate on the origins of neorealism in Italian post-war cinema and history, and focus on the works of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti. We also consider the longer-term influence of the movement both in Italy and elsewhere. Throughout this course, we reflect on the possibilities of mimesis in cinema, on the social and political engagement of neorealist film, and on the factors that caused its decline. Required screenings.
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