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  • Film 375: Screening the Holocaust

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    The course surveys ways in which the story of the Holocaust is conveyed through film. Focusing on the individual and aesthetic pleasure, modern Western film seems to be an inappropriate genre to depict the German mass murdering of 6 million Jews. But since the broadcasting of the NBC series Holocaust in 1975, feature films have replaced documentaries and historiographies in educating the public about the traumas of the unprecedented genocide. With the continuing impact of the Holocaust on Jewish, American, and German identity and politics, Holocaust films are more scrutinized than any other genre. We examine these aesthetic and philosophical controversies as well as the narrative and editing strategies filmmakers use to relate collective history and individual trauma. Special attention is given to the complex cinematographic perspectives on human agency in a world of bureaucratically administered killing. In the course, we try to close the gap between reading film theory and watching a Holocaust movie: we analyze the properties of cinematic language, reconstruct the sociohistorical and psychological formation of memory and imagination, and even question our own evaluation of a film. Screenings include Shoah; The Wannsee Conference; Europa, Europa; Enemies, A Love Story; Jakob the Liar; Schindler's List; and Life Is Beautiful. Required screenings.
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  • Film 390: TABOO: Boundary and Transgression in American Cinema

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    Almost from the first public exhibition of motion pictures in the United States, concerns were expressed about the content of film. Denied the First Amendment protection of free speech by a 1915 Supreme Court decision, movies were repeatedly subject to various attempts at regulating content by government at federal, state, and even municipal levels. Trying to stave off government control, Hollywood would eventually institute forms of self-regulation, first in the formation of the Production Code Administration and subsequently in the ratings system. Control of content in American movies may be seen as paternalistic, a top-down attempt to impose moral norms and standards of behavior on a diverse audience. But it also reflects changing standards of acceptable public discourse, most particularly with regard to violence, sexuality, and race. That topics once barred from dramatic representation by the Production Code-miscegenation, non-normative sexuality and "lower forms of sexuality," abortion, drug addiction-could eventually find a place in American movies speaks to changes in the culture at large. In trying to understand these cultural changes, this course explores films that challenged taboos, films from the early 1910s that brought on the first attempts to control film content to films released under the ratings system, which has exerted subtler forms of control over content. Required screenings.
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  • Film 419: Theories of Mass Media

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    This course explores theories of the mass media with an emphasis on television as well as its convergences with other media and computer technologies. It starts by examining theories that posit the media as instruments of societal maintenance or transformation and then examines the ways in which various theorists have refined or rejected elements of these theories in a quest for both specificity and complexity. In particular, the course examines media and cultural studies' attempts to synthesize critical paradigms ranging from political economy to semiotics to feminism. The course concludes with an examination of the challenges and opportunities posed to theorizations of the mass media by contemporary circumstances such as media conglomeration, niche marketing and microcasting, and global flows of information, capital, and people. Required screenings.
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  • Film 420: Film Theory

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    This course is an introduction to both classical and contemporary film theory. Beginning with the earliest attempts to treat cinema as a new and unique art form, the course initially reviews the various ways in which film theory attempted to define cinema in terms of its most essential properties. The course then examines more contemporary developments within film theory, more specifically its attempt to incorporate the insights of other critical and analytical paradigms, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and postmodernism. Throughout the course, we consider questions regarding the ontology of cinema, its relation to spectators, and the various ways in which its formal properties create meaning. Readings for the course include the major works of Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Fredric Jameson. Required screenings.
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  • Film 421: Film Historiography

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    This course is a seminar on the writing of film history and is intended to provide a capstone experience for Film and Media Studies majors. Through an engagement with the historiographical writings of scholars, such as Dominic LaCapra, Hayden White, and Michel Foucault, students gain an understanding of various genres of film historical writing, an appreciation for the kinds of research that film historians do, and a familiarity with the ways in which film historians delimit their field of study, form research questions, and develop hypotheses. In addition to reading and classroom discussions, students are expected to write a fairly lengthy paper (17 to 20 pages) that involves original historical research and the close examination of trade press, professional journals, fan magazines, and news articles. As preparatory assignments leading up to the final project, students also prepare project descriptions, bibliographies, and outlines that are shared and discussed in a workshop format. Required screenings.
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  • Film 422: Film Stardom, Performance and Fan Culture

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    This course focuses the Hollywood star system. We explore stars in relation to celebrity and consumerism, especially how "stardom" is created by a system that seeks to create effects in film viewers whether conceived as audiences, fans, or spectators. We examine the performance element of stardom and its relationship to genre, style, and changing film technology. Also of concern is how stars and the discursive construction of stardom intersect with gender representation, race, ideology, sexuality, age, disability, nationality, and other points of theoretical interest to and historical inquiry in contemporary film studies. While emphasis is placed on mainstream commercial U.S. cinema, students are encouraged to pursue questions beyond this framework within their own research. Required screenings.
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  • Film 430: Clown Princes

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    "Dying is easy, comedy is hard," runs an old theatrical adage. Nevertheless, some of the most popular actors in American film have chosen the hard path by typecasting themselves in comedy, playing repeated variations on the same character. "Comedian comedy," representing films that showcase the distinctive skills of great clown-actors, is the central concern of this course. We analyze how individual comedians rework performance traditions through the distinctive concerns of their time and culture to create idiosyncratic comic personae. We look at films starring Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Peter Sellers, Jim Carrey, and Eddie Murphy. Work for the course requires reading in comic theory and analytical essays. Required screenings.
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  • ShareFilm 438 - AESTHETICS: The Aesthetics of the Interface/Media and the Arts as Windows onto the World
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  • Film 450: American Film Genres

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    By close examination of three or four specific types of film narratives, this course explores how genre has functioned in the Hollywood mode of production. Students gain an understanding of genre both as a critical construct as well as a form created by practical economic concerns, a means of creating extratextual communication between film artist/producers and audience/consumers. Genres for study are chosen from the Western, the gangster film, the horror movie, the musical, screwball comedy, science fiction, the family melodrama, the woman's film, and others. In addition to film showings, there are readings in genre theory as well as genre analyses of individual films. Required screenings.
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  • Film 451: American Television Genres

    3.00 Credits
    Washington University in St Louis

    Questions of genre are central to any exploration of television's texts, whether they are being analyzed as craft, commerce, or cultural phenomenon. Genre has been used by critics and historians to ascribe "social functions" to groups of programs and to diagnose cultural preoccupations, while genre has been used industrially to manage expectations among audiences, advertisers, programmers, producers, and creative professionals. Investigating genres ranging from the soap opera to the Western, workplace situation comedies to sports, and game shows to cop shows, this course explores the role of genre in the production, distribution, and reception of American television. Students gain a critical understanding of genre theory and key arguments about the form and function of television texts; they develop a set of tools for analysis of televisual narrative and style; the social uses and meanings of genre; the institutional practices and presumptions of the American television industry; and the persistence of textual forms and audience formations in the face of structural changes such as deregulation, media convergence, and globalization. Required screenings.
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