course, is designed to give the student a broad introduction to the history and aesthetics of film from a roughly chronological perspective. There are weekly screenings of major films widely acknowledged as central to the evolution of the medium as well as supplementary reading assignments which provide both a narrative history and a strong encounter with the leading critical and theoretical issues of cinema, often within a context of 20^th century art and literature. While the student can take either half of the sequence, the program recommends that both parts of the course are taken, especially for any student contemplating film as a concentration. Mid-term and final exams; web responses; term paper. Open to First-year students only.

Prerequisite: a 100 or 200- level course in Film or Video History.

This course surveys the history of Japanese cinema from the silent films, with their extraordinary "benshi" performances, to recent Japanese cinema as seen at international film festivals. Along the way we will consider such topics as the relation of cinema to cultural traditions, to modernization, and to questions of nation and post-modernity. We will pay particular attention to the "golden age" of Japanese cinema in the 1950s. Methodologically, we will consider the utility of, for example, auteurism, historical poetics, and the study of cinema as a "complex social sign." Film texts include art films already well-known in the West along with examples of Japanese popular cinema. We will learn that Japanese cinema is more than an illustration of literature or an expression of individual artistic sensibility; it is both a vibrant strand within the ongoing history of Japanese popular culture and the object of considerable attention throughout the history of Western film studies. Mid-term and final exams; web responses; term paper.

What is Digital Cinema? What is a Computer Film? Technology offers so many options for digital acquisition, manipulation and presentation, that it is difficult to keep track of the semiotic and technical distinctions between film/video and the ubiquitous "new media." With an emphasis on hybridity of form and format, students will conceive individual projects utilizing available desktop computer and analog video resources. These projects in conjunction with lectures, demonstrations and screenings will form a matrix for the examination of "cinema" and "emerging technology." Issues for discussion include media essentialism and technological development, the rise of the digital feature, the Dogme Vow of Chastity, "the future of film and video," and digital delivery.

The 1950s "youth explosion" reached far beyond the United States: in countries as different as Japan and Britain, postwar economic and social development produced new kinds of youth. These young "folk devils" became the excuse for "moral panics" over issues such as juvenile delinquency, drugs, and racial miscegenation. Those discourses in turn created new resources for filmmakers: the violent energy of youth could be turned to political ends. In this class we will examine how some films from the late 1950s and early 1960s represented youth in Britain, Japan, and the USA. We will investigate the relation between the films and their industrial, social and (cross-)cultural contexts, for example their relation to popular music and the problem of "Americanization". For their final projects students will make use of their learning in cultural studies and their study of film as an audio-visual rhetoric to identify and form an argument about a group of youth films from any period of cinema. Web responses to film screenings are also required. Limited enrollment, for Upper College students only, or by permission of the professor.

This course will examine the electronic networks of the internet, by exploring a variety of information systems, virtual communities and on-line art projects. These various worlds, each as distinct interactive models, will be examined and critiqued through selected readings culled from critical theory, policy, history, and aesthetics. Each student will be expected to spend quality time on-line, to tackle several technologies as they apply to activities on the net and to design and mount an on-line project.