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Course Criteria
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2.00 Credits
In this course, we will consider important philosophical questions regarding violence, atrocities, memory, and forgiveness by analyzing world cinema that addresses these topics. Primary texts will include feature length films, television, photography, and documentary; we will pair those texts with philosophical readings that examine the nature of injustice and its consequences on those who survive conflict and those who remember. Themes discussed will include gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, religion, and identity.
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2.00 Credits
Through a critical analysis of key film and television works originally based on graphic novels and comics, this course will explore this process of adaptation with a special interest on how these works portray issues of contemporary interest such as global conflicts, identity and difference, gender and sexuality, and violence. Films and television shows may include profanity, violence, and/or sexually explicit images.
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2.00 Credits
This course explores the cultural implications of Hollywood action films. Although these films are often criticized as "big, loud, and stupid," students will learn how--for better and worse--Hollywood action blockbusters help to shape Americans' image of themselves and non-Americans' image of Americans. Examining these films, students will explore a wide array of sociological questions, such as what accounts for the enduring popularity of these movies? How do these films reinforce and challenge dominant American values? What role do women play in these movies and how is their role changing? Along with critically analyzing classics of the genre, the course will also include field trips to the newest Hollywood action blockbuster releases.
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4.00 Credits
Humanism is the belief that reason provides the best tools for solving the problems of the world. It has dominated political and literary thought at least since the seventeenth century. It is the foundation of human rights discourse, of many theories of democracy, and of the prevailing models of social justice. Nonetheless, humanism has its detractors, and the last several decades have seen the rise of "posthumanism," which seeks to challenge humanism's dominant position in political and social thought. Some critics suspect that humanism unconsciously upholds the racism, misogyny, and homophobia of the texts that established its terms in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Others are motivated by the challenges to reason presented by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and radical feminism. Queer Theory is among the must important posthumanist discourses in the United States, though not all queer theorists are posthumanists. This course investigates how queer theorists have attacked and defended humanism, and also explores queer theory's relationship to other posthumanist discourses. Authors to be considered may include Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Donna Haraway, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Jasbir Puar, Lee Edelman, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Joan Copjec. This course fulfills the Theory requirement for English majors.
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2.00 Credits
Emerging out of the anxious American popular culture of the forties and fifties, the cycle of films subsequently dubbed "film noir" represented a lurid mix of crime, sexuality, and urban nihilism. The (usually) male heroes of noir films struggle against an indifferent if not hostile universe, against their own borderline-pathological desires, and against femmes fatales whose allure is hard to separate from the threat they represent. Made, often on the cheap, by a ragtag collection of European expatriates and renegade American directors, the films are as compelling aesthetically as they are thematically. They mix elements of German Expressionism and Existentialism with home-grown American pulp fiction. We will discuss a representative sampling of noir films, attending both to cultural matters like gender and sexuality and to the aesthetic tendencies that make film noir distinct. Possible films include Ulmer's "Detour," Tourneur's "Out of the Past," Welles's "The Lady from Shanghai," and Wilder's "Double Indemnity."
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2.00 Credits
Through a critical analysis of key films featuring the plight of citizens against totalitarian and authoritative states, this course will explore the representation of armed and political resistance and the subsequent punishment of such actions through state violence in contemporary world cinema. Of special interest will be the portrayal of revolutionaries and activists, political prisoners, state actors, and the citizenry in general in order to discuss how these films might privilege certain ideologies and courses of action while criticizing others; how these conflicts are portrayed as extending beyond national borders through geopolitics and the intervention of developed nations within the developing world; and how race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and other markers of identity are represented within these works. Films may include profanity, violence, and/or sexually explicit images.
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2.00 Credits
I watch soap operas. I bake brownies. Normalcy is coursing through my veins. Jackie-O, Mark Waters's House of Yes One of the earliest representations of non-normative gender performances in film is The Dickinson Experimental Sound Film of 1894/5. Lasting only 17 seconds, the film captures a man playing a violin into a large recording horn while two men danced "cheek to cheek". The dancing men perhaps were an after thought for William Kennedy Dickson, the Scottish inventor who recorded the film, or as Vito Russo insists, in The Celluloid Closet (1981), as a direct representation of homoerotic affection between men. Nevertheless this film demonstrates the power found in questioning heteronormative constructs of gender identities and sexuality and raises questions of how films both represent, either by accident or design, non-normative sexual desire that ultimately become part of cultural identities. In this course we will explore representative films of queer cinema not only for their aesthetic value but also for their political meaning and historical legacy. Some of the themes and films we will explore are: problematic yet impressive explorations of gender identities of the pre-code era such as Sidney Drew's A Florida Enchantment (1914) and George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935); homoerotic desire in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Kenneth Anger's short films; iconic camp films such as Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Frank Perry's Mommie Dearest (1975); boundary and taste pushing films in the aftermath of Stonewall such as John Waters's Pink Flamingos (1972); and contemporary films where the pretense of "suggestive" homoerotic love interests are dropped and fully explored such as Sean S. Baker's Tangerine (2015) and Cline Sciamma's Girlhood (2014) .
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4.00 Credits
Video games have emerged in the 21st century as one of the most watched spectator sport. If you are not a gamer, this may not make sense to you, but with an annual revenue of $71 billion a year, watching people play video games is fast becoming the favorite go to sport for most U.S. Americans. Pro-gamers compete for hundred thousand dollar prizes and they receive sponsorships that can be worth millions. But to view the video game medium as only an economic force denies the complicated nature of gaming. In popular culture, gaming is the domain of nerdy teenagers, but video game conventions demonstrate that the average player is, well, everyone. Gamers are sweaty pimply teenagers, housewives, doctors-both the MD and PhD kind-women and men scantily dressed and hipsters to name a few. Video games appeal to folks across age, race, gender and social class. With shooter games like Call of Duty, fantasy role playing games like Dragon Age, successful indie games like Undertale, and literary gaming such as Firefly, Poems that go, video games are hybrid visual, digital, material that requires a methodology of its own. Academics have been studying video games and video game culture since the first Atari hit the market. Studying not only how it shapes other art forms, such as film, novels, poems, visual arts, but also how it codes humanity into the digital world. This course focuses on the critical analysis of social issues in video games. Class time will be split between playing across different video game genres (such as role-playing video games, action-adventure, life simulation games, strategy video games, sports games, music games, literary hypertexts, etc.) and participating in current academic debates around gaming and game studies. Class discussions will engage with the ludic and narrative elements of game theory from an interdisciplinary perspective that considers video games as cultural artifacts, an economic powerhouse, educational tools, as drivers of technical innovation and works of art.
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4.00 Credits
With programing that holds salacious titles such as Stalked, Last Seen Alive, Surviving Evil, Southern Fried Homicide, House of Horrors: Kidnapped, Beauty Queen Murders, Dates from Hell and Swamp Murders the Investigative Discovery (ID) channel is the go to place to marvel at the frequency of violent deaths white women suffer at the hands of deranged murderers. It would be erroneous to assume that the ID channel only sets out to tell the story of white women, but, with very few exceptions, most of the programming evolves around the horrifying deaths or near deaths experienced by white women. It also needs to be noted that in between true crime stories about the murder of beauty queens, southern belles and the young white woman last seen walking home from school, the ID channel also includes series of white women as murderers. But what the programming does not include, unless it is at the hands of hysterical or evil white women, are the deaths of men. As the 11th most watched prime time cable TV channel for people 18-49 and the most watched ad-supported TV channel for women ages 25-54 of 2015, we must ask, why? What is so attractive about watching dead white women? What is it about white women's deaths that peeks our voyeuristic instincts? Do we as a culture find pleasure at the horrifying deaths of white women at the hands of abusive lovers and husbands? What is so titillating about these TV series? In this course we will watch popular documentary-style crime drama, scripted TV series, films and documentary films that demonstrates our (unhealthy) obsession with the death of white women. We will study these works from an interdisciplinary approach that includes theorists from film studies, cultural anthropology, feminist studies and critical race studies. Students will be required to have a Netflix account and access to the Internet. Course requirements include attendance, class discussion participation, group presentations and a research paper.
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2.00 Credits
This production-based course will explore alternative, experimental technical and conceptual approaches to video as a creative, expressive artistic medium. We will work on location and in the lab. In addition to producing their own works, students will engage in discussions of ideas and critiques of each other's work. Prerequisites: ART/COMM/FILM 345 or instructor consent.
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