Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

We are pleased to welcome Ellen Rae Spiro as a Visiting Professor in Spring 2018. She has been a Professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas since 1998.

She is the recipient of numerous awards for documentary filmmaking, most notably for the film Body of War (2007), which won a festival award in Toronto, was nominated for a Producers Guild award, and won the National Board of Review award that year. The film was also short-listed for an Academy Award. Her film from the year before, Troop 1500, won a Gracie award, as did she for Best Director.

She also won an Emmy in 2004 for the film Are the Kids Alright? and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and a Fulbright Fellowship.

Her documentaries have received feature treatment on media outlets such as the Bill Moyers show and This American Life.  

For more information about Professor Spiro check the link here: http://www.spirofilms.com/ 

*** She will be teaching our Film 184 course on Documentary Production in Spring 2018***

For more questions about this course contact her here:  spirovich@gmail.com

The following courses have been approved to count for upper-division elective credit in the Film Studies major for Spring 2018.

Please visit their respective department websites for course descriptions and further information. 

 

French 170 – CN:39629   (25 seats) 

French Films: Introduction to French Cinema 

French 141 – CN:39616   (40 seats)

French Studies in an International Context

France, Europe and the Refugee "Crisis": Explorations in Fiction and Film

Slavic 138 – CN:32173   (30 seats)

Topics in Russian and Soviet Film; Sergei Eisenstein

Rhetoric 131T – CN:29870 (17 seats)

Genre in Film & Literature: Western Noir

Rhetoric 132T – CN:40955 (17 seats)

Auteur in Film: The Films of the Coen Brothers 

English 173 – CN:38962   (40 seats)

The Language and Literature of Films (Post)colonial Film

GWS 126 – CN:39436   (50 seats) 

Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde

AfricAmSt 142AC – CN:21951   (138 seats)

Race and American Film 

Anthro 138B – CN:39639   (12 seats)

Field Production of Ethnographic Film

EthnicSt 122AC – CN:24203   (90 seats) 

Ethnicity and Race in Contemporary American Films

Italian 170 – CN:32137  (35 seats) 

The Italian Cinema: History, Genres, Authors

Korean 186 – CN:39292  (30 seats) 

Introduction to Korean Cinema 

Art 141 – CN: 323082 (17 opens seats) 

Temporal Structures: Video and Performance Art

Art 174 – CN:41461 (17 open seats)

Advanced Digital Video 

The faculty of the Department of Film & Media stands in support of our DACA (Dreamer) students and their families. Our department remains a welcoming place for all students. We are dismayed by the President's recent announcement that would end the DACA program in six months and support UC President Napolitano's call for a permanent solution that provides a secure path to citizenship. We will do all we can to support students in our classes and our program who are affected by the potential termination of the DACA program.

Congratulations to our graduates in the class of 2017!

Join us Wednesday, May 17th, 2017 at 2:00 pm in Zellerbach Hall for the commencement ceremony. Students, please make sure you have pre-purchased your guest tickets in the Film department office. 

Go Bears!

Damon Young, assistant professor in French and Film & Media, is teaching a graduate course in the French department this Fall 2017! This course will also count for Film graduate student credit – for details, please contact Prof. Young or Marcus Norman directly. 

French 265A: I Confess: Self-Narration and Self-Representation from the Novel to New Media

Is the “self” of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the 21st century digital selfie? To what extent is subjectivity bound up in the means of its technical mediation? This course stages an encounter between histories of autobiography, theories of the subject/subjectivation, and recent developments in media theory. We will ask how the “private self” of an earlier colonial modernity was given form in the novel and the autobiography, then explore how the invention of photography and film refashioned the subject as “ideally visible,” before considering how digital media cultures generate forms of subjectivity for which the defining imperative would no longer be confession but rather circulation. We will spend some time with Foucault’s discussions of the confessional imperative that situates sexuality at the opaque foundation of the modern subject, reading them in relation to critical commentaries on the production of the “I” in literature and philosophy (works by Butler, Paige, Lucey, De Man). We will explore the interrelation of medium, subjectivity, and apparatus in theoretical works by authors that might include Althusser, Deleuze, Debord, Derrida, Baudrillard, Stiegler, and/or Preciado. Throughout, we will draw on specific examples of autobiography and/or self-portraiture in various media forms. Taught in English, with texts available in French or English translation.

Check out our exciting course offerings for Summer 2017! Included are courses required for the major, upper-division film electives, a production course, and even a course for nonmajors.

Enrollment begins February 1st, 2017 through CalCentral for all UC Berkeley students.

Session A ||| May 22 – June 30

Film R1A: The Craft of Writing – Recording the Un-recorded: Folklore, Movie Monstrosities, and Global Community
Katherine Guerra

Film 20 – Film and Media Cultures
Alex Bush

Film 25A – History of Film: Silent Era
Emily Carpenter
​
Session D ||| July 3 – August 11

Film 50 – Film for Nonmajors
Emily Carpenter

Film 108: Film Genre – Game of Thrones
Justin Vaccaro (caricatured above)

Film 129 – History of Avant-Garde Film
Eileen Jones

Film 187: Special Topics in Film Production – Intro to 16mm
David Borengasser and Colin Brant

The following courses have been approved to count for upper-division elective credit in the Film Studies major for Spring 2017. Please visit their respective department websites for course descriptions and further information. 

AFRICAM 142AC – Race in American Film

ARMENI 126 – Armenian Culture and Film

EALANG 105 – Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film

ETHSTD 122AC – Ethnicity and Race in Contemporary American Films

FRENCH 140D: An Introduction to the Films of the French New Wave

FRENCH 178B – Studies in French Film

GERMAN 182 – German Cinema in Exile

ITALIAN 170 – The Italian Cinema: History, Genres, Authors

JAPAN 188 – Japanese Visual Culture: Introduction to Anime

KOREAN 187 – History and Memory in Korean Cinema

NESTUD 165 – Film and Fiction of Iran

RHETOR 131T – Genre in Film and Literature

RHETOR 135T – Selected Topics in Film (Color Theory)

RHETOR 189.3 – Special Topics in Rhetoric (Television Storytelling: The Poetics of Complex TV Narratives)

SLAVIC 138 – Topics in Russian and Soviet Film

If you would like to petition for another course to be added to this list, please submit your requests to undergraduate major advisor Blaine Jones at blainejones@berkeley.edu. You MUST include the following: course description, course syllabus, and the number of units. Courses under 4 units will not be approved for upper-division electives. 

Save the date!

The Spring 2017 Rhetoric and Film commencement will be held Wednesday, May 17th, 2017 at 2:00 pm in the Zellerbach Auditorium. Details to follow in the coming weeks and months!