Film 10 is our gateway class for undergraduates possibly interested in the major: it serves both as an introduction to the early history of cinema (from its nineteenth-century prehistory to the sound cinema of the 1930s) and as an introduction to the technical skills necessary for close analysis of film. Topics considered will include the rise of early film, the gradual development of cinematic narrative, the development of national cinematic styles in the 1920s, the transition to sound, and studio filmmaking of the 1930s. The approach is at once historical and aesthetic: students...
The Documentary Forms course examines the ways in which documentary impulses and forms are present in various media—photography, film, video, new media. The course inherits the kinds of topics previously taught in our Documentary Film course but expands the possibilities to include other media forms and more hybrid or comparative treatments. The courses taught under this number may include historical surveys of specific media and their documentary impulses and functions; documentary photography; reality television; or documentary film, but could also be courses that employ a comparative media...
135 EXPERIMENTAL AND ALTERNATIVE MEDIA ART (formerly FILM 129)
The course explores the international development of artist-made, experimental and avant-garde film, electronic or new media practices. It looks at the ways artists have invented new formal languages in order to express their unique ideas and vision, and also how they have created alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition for their work. The course examines major movements in experimental and alternative media that exist outside of the constraints of industrial and mass-media forms, as it at once critiques and expands dominant forms of media. Course goals include...
This course focuses on topics in national, transnational, and global cinema, television, photography, and/or new media, examining the ways in which shared cultural discourses, institutions, histories, and modes of production are negotiated through various media practices within and between individual cities, nations, regions, and/or global networks. The Global Media course inherits the kinds of topics previously taught in our National Cinema course but expands the possibilities to include other media forms and more hybrid or comparative treatments of the classificatory systems based in nation...
This course focuses on the history, theory, and experience of old and new media technologies, examining the emergence and implementation of media technologies, the discourses surrounding them, their use by media institutions and/or artists, and the forms, styles, aesthetics, modes of address, and experiences they afford. It also analyzes the histories of media technologies, their theorization by practitioners and scholars, and the various methodologies that have been used to understand their development, use, standardization, modification, and/or obsolescence. The various courses...
This course serves to instruct undergraduate Film majors in advanced film and media studies analysis, research, and writing. A variety of forms of writing will be undertaken, including film analysis, film reviewing and criticism, film festival programming notes, essay argumentation, and research scholarship. The course provides undergraduate majors with exposure to, analysis of, and opportunities to try out various modes of professional film writing. It also prepares students who are interested in completing an honors thesis in the following spring semester, although that is not...
This course is intended to introduce undergraduates to the study of a range of media, including photography, film, television, video, and print and digital media. The course will focus on questions of medium “specificity” or the key technological/material, formal and aesthetic features of different media and modes of address and representation that define them. Also considered is the relationship of individual media to time and space, how individual media construct their audiences or spectators, and the kinds of looking or viewing they enable or encourage. The course will discuss the...
The goal of this course is to focus on particular issues in film aesthetics and the relationships between film and culture in more depth. Film Aesthetics familiarizes the students with some of the major technological and aesthetic innovations of the past 80 years which have given rise to the cinema as we know it today. Goals of the course include: fostering students’ awareness of the aesthetic, economic, social, and political contexts in which sound cinema developed and the impact which cinema had, in turn, on nations, cultures, and historical events; helping students acquire a...
The Digital Media Studies course examines the ways in which digital media first developed and have come to shape our engagement with contemporary culture, with a particular focus on aesthetics, form, and politics. Goals of the course include helping students to identify, analyze, and describe themes in contemporary media and digital culture; to acquire a conceptual vocabulary necessary for the examination of digital media technology and to understand the advantages and limits of that approach; to understand the influence of digital media technologies on contemporary culture,...
This course provides students with an introduction to the field of television studies complete with: a factual foundation in television history across its broadcast, cable, and convergence phases; a conceptual apparatus through which to investigate how televisual form (narrative and aesthetics) dramatizes and problematizes social issues and cultural values; and an analytic procedure or critical operation (close reading of a television text) through which students may compose complex original arguments. This course inherits a concern with television history previously taught in...
