Courses
Students majoring in the program are expected to complete successfully the following courses.
- First year: Film 113-114, History of Cinema (or any other introductory-level film history course)
- Sophomore year: Film 201-202, Introduction to the Moving Image, and a history course within the program
- Junior year: Major Conference; a course outside the program related to proposed Senior Project work; Physics 118, Light and Color (or another related laboratory or social science course)
- Senior year: Major Conference; a technical seminar (noncredit); Word and Image seminar (noncredit)
Current Course List
Film 109
The History and Aesthetics of Film
This survey course is designed for first-year students, especially those who are considering film as a focus of their undergraduate studies. Weekly screenings and lectures explore films by Chaplin, Deren, Griffith, Hitchcock, Keaton, Renoir, and Rossellini, among others. Students also read theoretical works by authors such as Arnheim, Bazin, Eisenstein, Munsterberg, Pudovkin, and Vertov.
Film 113–114
History of Cinema
A broad introduction to the history and aesthetics of film from a roughly chronological perspective. This course consists of weekly screenings of major films widely acknowledged as central to the evolution of the medium and supplementary reading that provides both a narrative history and a strong encounter with the leading critical and theoretical issues of cinema, often within a context of 20th-century art and literature. Open to first-year students only.
Part I, “Cinema’s Origin to the End of the Silent Era,” begins with the early films of Lumière, Méliès, Porter, Sennett, and Feuillade, then explores the rapid evolution of the medium as seen in the works of D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim; American silent comedians Chaplin and Keaton; Soviet filmmakers Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Vertov; German expressionists Murnau, Lang, and Pabst; major Japanese figures Kinugasa and Ozu; practitioners of the French avant-garde (Kirsanov, Dulac, Man Ray, Léger, Duchamp, and Clair); and innovative documentarians Ruttmann and Flaherty.
The second half of the sequence begins with crucial films in the transition to the technology and aesthetic of the sound film on an international scale (those by Lang, Sternberg, Buñuel, Vertov, and Vigo), followed by a study of the evolution of the long-take, deep-focus aesthetic in the films of Renoir, Welles, and Mizoguchi; of Hollywood genres in the films of Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Sturges; the rise of neorealism in Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti; the contribution of the American avant-garde in Deren, Peterson, Brakhage, Anger, Smith, Conner, and Breer; the French New Wave in Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer; the northern tradition in Dreyer and Bergman; selections of Asian cinematic practice in films of Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa, and Ozu; and finally, further European innovations in Antonioni, Varda, the Taviani brothers, Pasolini, et al. Readings are drawn from works by Bazin, Brakhage, Deren, Bresson, Sontag, and others.
Film 167 Integrated Arts
Survey of Media Art
An introduction to the history of moving-image art made with electronic media, with a focus on avant-garde traditions. Topics include video art, guerrilla television, expanded cinema, feminist media, Net art, music video, microcinema, digital feature filmmaking, and art made from video games.
200-level courses
Film 201-202
Introduction to the Moving Image
This two-semester course introduces the basic problems (technical and theoretical) related to film and/or electronic motion picture production. It is designed to be taken in the sophomore year and leads to a spring Moderation project. Prerequisite: a 100- or 200-level course in film history.
Film 203A / Integrated Arts 203A
Electronic Media Workshop: Sound and Image
This production course examines the major aesthetic elements of the visual and the aural. The primary focus is the artful juxtaposition of sound and image through the production of short film or video projects. The course consists of technical instruction, readings, in-class screenings, and critiques of student projects.
Film 203B / Integrated Arts 203B
Digital Animation
Students make short video projects using digital animation and compositing programs (Macro¬media Flash and Adobe After Effects) in a workshop designed to help them develop a facility with these tools and find personal animating styles that surpass the tools at hand. Techniques and aesthetics associated with digital animation that challenge conventions of story¬telling, editing, figure/ground relationship, and portrayal of the human form are discovered. Diverse examples of animating and collage from film, music, writing, photography, and painting are referred to. Prerequisite: familiarity with a nonlinear video editing program.
Film 204
Documentary History
This historical overview and critique of the documentary form makes use of ethnographic and propaganda films, the social documentary, cinema verité, and the travelogue. The class investigates the basic docu¬mentary issue of truth and/ or objectivity and critiques films using readings from feminist theory, cultural anthropology, general film history/theory, and other areas.
Film 211-212
Screenwriting I
The scriptwriting process is studied from idea through plot and outline to finished script, including character development and dramatic/ cinematic structure. Students’ work is analyzed throughout the course. Limited enrollment, open to students with a demonstrable background in film or writing and a willingness to share their work with others.
Film 214 Integrated Arts
Seminar: Special Topics in the History of Cinema
Seminars offer an in-depth examination of a particular period, style, filmmaker, or national school of filmmaking. Weekly screenings of acknowledged and influential masterpieces and related lectures make up the bulk of the course, with supplementary reading. Enroll¬ment is open, but class size may be limited.
Recent seminars in the History of Cinema have included the following.
Filmmaking in Latin America
An overview of filmmaking in Latin America and an introduction to the theoretical premises and aesthetic trends that have marked its development. Beginning with the arrival of sound and ending with the return to popular genres (melodrama, comedy, horror) in the 1980s and ’90s, the readings and film screenings illustrate, among other points, the question of national cinema; the struggle for economic viability; the suitability of hermeneutic categories devised for European and Hollywood cinema to the study of Latin America’s film production; the impact of Hollywood cinema, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave; the continuity/discontinuity of generic paradigms and thematic concerns across time and borders; the dichotomy of art cinema versus popular cinema; the idea of the filmmaker as witness and cinema as an instrument for political and social change; and possible links between film and literature (magical realism), the visual arts (surrealism), and music (tango, bolero). Among the filmmakers whose work is screened and/or discussed are Luis Buñuel, Glauber Rocha, Jorge Sanjinés, Patricio Guzmán, Maria Luisa Bemberg, and Fernando Solanas. Readings are in English, but students who wish to read materials in the original Spanish are encouraged to do so.
History of Yiddish Cinema
This seminar views selected Yiddish films, from Second Avenue vaudeville houses to the golden age of Yiddish theater and cinema in Vilnius, Warsaw, the Lower East Side, and Hollywood. Suggested private screenings of additional films, assigned readings, and class discussions make up the rest of the curriculum. Knowledge of Yiddish is helpful but not required (all films are subtitled in English).
The American Avant-Garde Film, 1942–75
A survey of one of the most significant artistic movements in film following World War II, this course focuses on a relatively small number of major filmmakers: the early pioneers of the 1940s, Deren, Peterson, Menken, Maas, and Broughton; the mythopoetic artificers of the 1950s and early 1960s, Anger, Brakhage, and Baillie; and the formalists of the late 1960s, Frampton, Snow, and Gehr. It also pays attention to the strong graphic/collage cinema of artists like Cornell, Conner, Smith, and Breer, and to the anarchic, comic improvisations of figures like Jacobs, Kuchar, and MacLaine. It ends in the mid-1970s by touching on the movement’s then future prospects, e.g., the revitalization of storytelling through autobiography (Mekas) and feminist/critical narrative (Rainer). Supplementary readings include many theoretical works by the filmmakers themselves and material touching on parallel avant-garde movements in painting, photography, poetry, and music, with works by highly influential artists like John Cage, Charles Olson, and others.
Postwar Film in Italy and France
A lecture survey of two major cinematic schools in postwar Western Europe, both of which had enormous international influence. Four concentrated periods of intense creative activity are studied: the immediate postwar years in Italy, which were dominated by neorealist filmmakers De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti; the mid-1950s in France, when Bresson and Tati were most impressive as “classicists”; the French New Wave in the late ’50s and early ’60s, which saw the dawn of the directorial careers of Chabrol, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut, Varda, et al.; and the miraculous maturation of a number of key directors in Italy at roughly the same time, including Antonioni, Fellini, Olmi, and Pasolini.
Film 218
Theories of Film
An introduction to the major developments in classic and contemporary film theory and criticism. The course covers key texts and authors (Kracauer, Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Mulvey, Bordwell) and examines the cultural contexts that gave rise to these debates and arguments. Among the issues under review: the specificity of film form; cinematic realism; the politics and ideology of cinema; the relation between cinema and language; the way meaning is constructed in the process of viewing a film; spectatorship, identification, and subjectivity; the representation of women and racial and sexual minorities; and the formation of film canons and hierarchies. The syllabus pairs writings on a central principle of film analysis with cinematic examples that allow students to apply and/or question the main ideas presented in the various readings.
Film 219 Integrated Arts
Film and Modernism
This course explores the relationship between a certain mode of cinematic achievement, for the most part labeled avant-garde, and the major tenets of modernist art, both visual and literary. Many of the films studied are by artists who worked in other media (Cornell, Duchamp, Léger, and Strand) or whose work manifests a direct relationship to a particular artistic movement, such as surrealism, futurism, or constructivism. An attempt is made to relate certain films to parallel achievements in photography, poetry, and music, with some attention paid to relatively little-seen filmmakers, such as Jennings, Kinugasa, and Lye. Much of the assigned reading is not film criticism as such, but crucial critical works that help to define modernism in general, including those by Baudelaire, Brecht, Moholy-Nagy, Ortega y Gasset, and Pound. Filmmakers studied include Buñuel, Dulac, Eisenstein, Man Ray, Ruttmann, and Vertov, from Europe; and Americans Anger, Brakhage, Conner, Deren, Frampton, Gehr, Rainer, and Snow.
Film 223
Graphic Film Workshop
An exploration of the materials and processes available for the production of graphic film or graphic film sequences, this course consists of instruction in animation, rephotography, rotoscoping, and drawing on film. The class also views and discusses a number of films that are primarily concerned with the visual.
Film 228 GSS
Women in Film
This course looks at women behind and in front of the camera, from the beginnings of film to the present, and at the construct of “the feminine” both in film and within spectators. Read¬ings are drawn from film history and theory, especially the multiple forms of feminist criticism connecting the feminine to gender, sexuality, class, and race. Films studied are drawn from classical narrative cinema and independent film and include work by Chantal Akerman, Martine Attile, Julie Dash, Maya Deren, Alfred Hitchcock, Tracey Moffett, Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Sirk, and Josef von Sternberg, among others.
Film 231
Documentary Film Workshop
This advanced filmmaking workshop, intended for students who are especially interested in dramatic, documentary, or reportage cinema, teaches hands-on shooting and ways to work out solutions to practical and/or aesthetic problems as they are encountered in the making of a film.
Film 232
Horror
This course considers horror films across a broad historical and geographical range, including the work of Bava, Boyle, Browning, Cronenberg, Denis, de Palma, Feuillade, Franju, Haneke, Hooper, Jodorowsky, Kobayashi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Miike, Murnau, Nakata, Polanski, Romero, Tourneur, Ulmer, and Whale. The class begins with generic definitions and transformations before moving into such topics as gender and sexuality, abjection, the uncanny, apocalypse, serial killing, and the ideology of horror.
Film 235
Video Installation
Since the beginning of video, artists have experimented with installation. Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik used multiple monitors in the 1960s, Joan Jonas incorporated video with live performance, Juan Downey and Steina Vasulka experimented with interactive laser discs, and so on. The use of live feeds and large and small video projections on walls and objects imply complex shifts of narrative composition as well as temporal and spatial relationships. Through readings and screenings, the class examines these diffuse practices. Students are encouraged to explore high- and low-tech solutions to their audiovisual desires and to imagine the campus as their canvas. Prerequisite: Film 201–202.
Film 237 Africana Studies, American Studies
Contemporary Black American Cinema
An examination of African American cinema from 1970 to 2000 that also traces the movement of black cultural producers within the independent and commercial spheres as they confront the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary black representation. Topics include post-’60s representational politics, blaxploitation, the black star, the crime drama, cross-racial buddy films, and black women’s films. Directors studied include Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Melvin Van Peebles.
Film 239 Asian Studies
Cinema of Asia
This course concentrates on the feature film production of three regions: Japan, China (including mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), and India (Bollywood, in particular). The historical development of the relatively orthodox national cinema of Japan is reviewed before the class investigates how the ethnic, linguistic, and geopolitical complexity of the other regions puts into question the apparently stable category of national cinema. In addition to the fundamental goal of teaching students to appreciate a range of unfamiliar film texts, the course seeks to develop an understanding of the changing place of cinema in a wider cultural landscape. Limited enrollment.
Film 240 Asian Studies
Chinese Cinema
A survey of the cinemas of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from a comparative perspective. The emphasis is on contemporary works and the diverse genres represented in them, ranging from art cinema and the new cinema movements that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s to popular genres like the martial arts and gangster films. The scope of the course is trans¬national and national, addressing topics related to global spectatorship, such as cult audiences and film festivals, and interregional influences.
Film 241
Genre
What constitutes a genre in commercial narrative cinema? Three case studies are examined: horror, science fiction, and the gangster film. Topics of investigation include genres as literary and cross-cultural categories, repetition versus difference, reflexivity and revisionism, and generic hybrids. Priority is given to students who have completed film studies courses.
Film 247
Video Strategies
An advanced production course centered on the basic aesthetic, theoretical, and technical issues of electronic media production. The course consists of technical instruction, readings, in-class screenings, and critiques of student projects.
Film 248
Framing the Election
Fiction and documentary works like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 and Nashville, D. A. Pennebaker’s War Room, and ®™ark’s voteauction successfully capture the complex narratives and legacies of ¬elections over the past 40 years. This course provides a structure for students to capture, ¬process, frame, and produce some aspect of presidential politics in terms of their personal experience. Works may reflect any political persuasion and take any form, including documentary, diary, personal essay, fiction, or music.
Film 253 Integrated Arts
Political Video
This production course investigates the work of film and video artists who have produced work critical of a specific social or political situation. Whether didactic, subversive, agitprop, rant, provocation, or documentation, these works employ inventive solutions to visual aesthetics and narrative structure. Students engage in an examination of these practices, past and present, through the screenings of a wide range of experimental films and video art, including works by Guy Debord, Carolee Schneemann, Jonas Mekas, Martha Rosler, Antonio Muntadas, and Yvonne Rainer, among others. Assigned readings of historical and theoretical texts augment the screenings and class discussions. Students are also expected to apply these investigations to the production of three video projects. Prerequisite: Film 201–202.
Film 278 Integrated Arts
Film Production Workshop
Class members function as a rotating production team, combining their talent, imagination, and industry in the creation of an original 16mm film. Each student has an opportunity to write, direct, and edit one scene, and to act as crew or cast in other scenes. Issues of art direction, narrative continuity, and collaboration are addressed as they arise. The primary goal is for students to develop technical and storytelling proficiency through working in a variety of roles in a film production.
Film 280
Designed Obstacles and Spontaneous Response
This class explores the process of story or script development through spontaneous written response to assigned problems, situations, complications, and possibilities. The purpose: to unhinge caution and access story by putting aside logic and judgment in the initial stages of creating an idea, character, and plot. Later in the semester, elements of structure, balance, collaboration, and evaluation are added to the mix. All assignments are handwritten in class and read aloud. Think of it as a scavenger hunt for the imagination. Open to all students interested in writing for literature, theater, or film.
300-level courses
Film 301
Major Conference
The Major Conference provides a forum for the exchange of ideas prior to Senior Project work and makes useful technical information available for individual projects through combined ¬theory-practice sessions. Students are required to complete a short film and to share their work with others. In addition, films are screened and readings assigned to establish a common ground for discussion and argument.
Recent examples of Major Conferences include the following.
Found Footage, Appropriation, Hacks
This course surveys the history of appropriation in experimental media from the 1950s to ¬current artistic and activist production efforts, including culture jamming, game hacking, sampling, hoaxing, resistance, interference, and tactical media intervention. The class examines a spectrum of traditions, including the strategic reworking and recontextualizing of educational, industry, and/or broadcast media sources; the re-editing of outtakes and recycling of detritus; and a variety of works of piracy and parody that skew and subvert media codes. Issues regarding gender, identity, media and Internet politics, technology, copyright, and aesthetics are also addressed.
Live Video and Systems of Surveillance
This course gives students a better understanding of live video production as a vehicle for artistic expression. Course participants develop ways of working with video’s most unique property: its ability to produce an immediate and continuous stream of images and sounds. Surveillance, streaming media, spinning, call-in talk shows, and cell phone usage have primed audiences and spectators to expect immediate access to and feedback from their media. How does the media artist respond? Course participants work on individual projects, using cameras, monitors, switchers, surveillance systems, and software-based video mixers. Students also work collectively to produce one live piece to be broadcast to an audience. Additionally, the larger cultural and psychological impact of live video production is discussed, supplemented by readings and viewings of work by Nam June Paik, Richard Serra, Dan Graham, Rosalind Krauss, Raymond Carver, Julia Scher, the Surveillance Camera Players, and others.
Multimedia Installation and Events
This course charts a historical and critical framework for the term “multimedia” and provides source material and inspiration for the creation of projects that combine art forms and/or elude traditional categorization. Students compose individual projects using video, slides, surveillance systems, mixers, switchers, projection systems, and monitors. Through readings and screenings, the class examines issues of spectatorship, immediacy, interface design, spatial construction, time, boredom, and performance.
Recording Techniques for Film and Music Makers
This course explores the principles and practices of sound recording for audio, video, and film applications. Digital recording equipment, the mixing console, microphones, field recording techniques, and sync and Foley for film/video will be covered in the recording studio and in a variety of site-specific environments. Students have access to the recording studio in the Avery Arts Center and the ProTools system for recording and postproduction. Students are required to produce a number of short works in film/video, audio, or installation.
Space, Sound, and the Moving Image
This course is intended to refine students’ video production skills and give them a better understanding of installation as a medium for artistic expression. Participants use video (as well as other materials and media) to design and build real environments that are meant to be experienced spatially. Particular attention is paid to the use of sound and light to transform existing spaces into site-specific installations. Students also use video monitors, projections, ¬closed-circuit systems, and surveillance equipment in innovative ways and consider how to design spaces using time-based media and interactive elements.
Film 302
Advanced Projects in Nonlinear Editing
An investigation of the mutual influence of sound and picture in audiovisual perception that is two parts postproduction (hands-on individual and collaborative sound projects) and one part theoretical analysis. Students explore the process of building tracks on digital nonlinear editing systems and the technical, aesthetic, and sonic relationships between sound and image in the production of cinematic, electronic, and digital works. Students should be familiar with the fundamentals of computer-based electronic media. Prerequisite: Film 300, equivalent experience, or by permission of the instructor.
Film 303 Integrated Arts
Film in the Digital Media Age
An exploration of ¬computer-based applications for work with sound and image. Students develop their own projects using desktop video, compositing (After Effects), and sound programs. Apart from production, some emphasis is given to critical discussions of issues such as film versus video; media essentialism and technological development; the future of film and video; and digital delivery.
Film 307
Landscape and Media
Designed for junior film and video majors, the course compares film and painted representations of the American landscape to those of television and video. Students are required to complete a short film or video referencing these issues. McKibben’s Age of Missing Information is the primary text.
Film 312
Advanced Screenwriting
An intensive writing workshop in which students create a long-form screenplay that reflects a complex original idea. Weekly writing assignments and class critiques are at the core of the workshop, although issues such as adaptation, production-imposed practicalities, and the role of the marketplace are also discussed. Enroll¬ment is by permission of the instructor.
Film 315
Cinemagic IX
This course, offered every two or three years, journeys through the idyllic times of pre–World War II, through the horrors of war, and into the wonders and magic of cinema. Many films are screened—some good, some bad, and a few that will long endure. Each screening is preceded by a theme song, a short film, and a lecture. The highlights of the course are the screenings of Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, an 11-hour trilogy, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Priority is given to film majors.
Film 317
Film Production Workshop: Cinematography, the Film Image
This junior-level production workshop gives students working in film a more thorough understanding of a wide range of cinematic vocabu¬laries and aesthetics unique to the language of film. Students finish short films that explore the qualities of film through extensive in-class exploration of film stocks, lighting techniques, and cinemagraphic strategies. The class visits a New York motion picture lab to better understand the photo/chemical implications of film in the age of digital imaging.
Film 319-320
Film Aesthetics Seminar
Special film-related topics, both theoretical and practical, are studied in depth. The seminar is designed for students who have already taken a film course or who, through personal experience and interest, have acquired some knowledge of the medium. Weekly screenings are held and a strong emphasis is placed on supplementary reading.
Recent seminars have included the following.
American Graphic Film: Abstraction, Animation, and Collage
This seminar provides an in-depth study of a ¬significant tradition within the American avant-garde film that connects quite directly to modernist practice in the graphic arts, particularly painting and printmaking. Most of the films under discussion eschew dramatic narrative for imagery that provides a direct “adventure of visual perception.” Because the images move over time, the class inevitably has to deal with intricate matters of abstract musical form, which is a source of inspiration for many of these artists. Other theoretical issues discussed include the intention behind the drive toward visual abstraction and the inherent tension between the real and the imagined. At first, the focus is on the works of several classic practitioners from the ’50s, ’60, and ’70s, including Joseph Cornell, Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, Robert Breer, Larry Jordan, Pat O’Neill, Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner, George Landow, Paul Sharits, and Stan Brakhage. Students next consider the younger generation that emerged from the ’80s onward: Jennifer Reeves, Mark Street, Michele Smith, Eve Heller, Craig Baldwin, et al.
On Reenactment
The class surveys the styles and meaning of reenactments, including remakes, homages, reinterpretations, sequels, and reruns, in order to pose questions about history, trauma, memory and forgetting, narrative and authenticity. Themes such as fictionalizing historical events (Kiarostami, 9/11 docudramas), repetition in experimental media (Arnold, Jacobs), performance and playacting (Ra’ad, Dougherty), memory and repression (Hitchcock) are highlighted in the screenings. Issues of gender, identity, politics, history, technology, and copyright are also addressed.
Film Noir and the American Baroque
This seminar focuses on films whose stylistic traits include narrative distortion, asymmetrical composition, and low-key lighting. Major themes, often ones that express social instability, embrace extreme psychological situations of sexual repression and/or rebellion, madness, sadism, and paranoia. Films studied include defining works of early noir like Shadow of a Doubt and Out of the Past; late, mature masterpieces like Touch of Evil and Kiss Me Deadly; baroque melodramas like Johnny Guitar and Written on the Wind; and self-conscious attempts to revive old aesthetic virtues in a fresh guise in films like Chinatown, Blue Velvet, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Memento. Readings include both critical literature and primary texts, notably pulp fiction from the 1930s that helped give rise to the later cinematic trend.
Reading Recent Texts: The Robot
This seminar considers the shifting boundaries between humans and machines. With an emphasis on the robot, the class considers everything from Poo-Chi the Interactive Pet® to the pesky “cyber bots” that disabled eToys®. Through discussion, directed readings, presentations and fieldwork, students examine specific theories, art practices, and representations. Robots include Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, ASIMO, HAL, the Sojourner rover, and the Stepford wives.
Film 323 STS
Thinking about Video Games
An analysis of computer gaming through philosophy, history, cultural theory, and art. Topics include the nature of games and their function in society; the qualities of human-computer interaction; depictions of gender, race, national identity and war; aesthetic theories of game design; ludology versus narratology in game studies; “serious games,” game worlds, and virtual reality; videogame modification, machinima, and artist-made videogames. Readings include Wittgenstein, Winnicott, Huizinga, Caillois, McLuhan, Jenkins, Nakamura, Dibbell, Aarseth, Juul, Frasca, Poole, Atkins, Manovich, Bogost, and Galloway. Prerequisite: previous course work in film and electronic arts, art history, or philosophy.
Film 327
Cinematic Time
This course brings together critical and theoretical views regarding the cinematic representation of time. Topics of discussion include the aesthetics of time (“long-take style,” ellipsis, realism, flashback); the narrative poetics of time (history and memory, the everyday); the relationship of cinema and photography; and how the ideas of duration, ephemerality, chance, stasis, and repetition are articulated through the technology of cinema. The screening program emphasizes work by East Asian filmmakers, including Akira Kurosawa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kenji Mizoguchi, Tsai Ming-liang, Shinji Aoyama, and Jia Zhangke. Readings consist of theo¬retical writings by Barthes, Bazin, Benjamin, Deleuze, Doane, Kracauer, and Pasolini, among others.
Film 328
Cinematic Adaptation
Is adaptation translation or response? This workshop takes on all kinds of inspirational forms—music, science, painting, literature, dance, philosophy, etc.—and uses them as the basis for cinematic adaptation. Through a series of exercises, students engage an outside work and translate it to film.
Film 332
Advanced Digital Editing and Sound Design
Students are guided through all phases of postproduction, from an assembly cut to sound mix to getting an answer print made. The course consists of in-class viewings, analysis of editing strategies, critiques of student projects from start to finish, and technical instruction. Advanced postproduction steps covered include creating a sound track, making and shooting titles, preparing the film for the lab (original cutting, hot splicing, A&B rolling), and obtaining corrected answer prints. Also discussed are options for labs, sound-mixing facilities, optical houses, grant writing, and future exhibition.
Film 335
Human Rights Video Clinic
Advanced digital video postproduction skills are taught in the context of human rights documentaries. Working with Witness, an advocacy organization that uses video technology and media campaigns to promote and secure human rights around the world, students produce short documentary projects for webcast. Using footage shot by Witness partner groups and working in teams, students produce short “Rights Alerts” from start to finish, including tape logging, research on issues and advocacy objectives, liaison with human rights advocates, script preparation, narrative strategy, sound and narration, editing and production, and webcasting.
Film 338
Script to Screen
This workshop is designed for juniors and first-semester seniors in preparation for shooting an ambitious video or film project (narrative, experimental, or documentary). The first portion of the course is devoted to script revision and development, with an emphasis on craft and production feasibility. Using the revised screenplay as a map, the second half of the course is devoted to creating a detailed production plan. Students are expected to present choices for media, stock, lighting, production design, editing strategies, sound, locations, tone, and casting as an extension of the central ideas expressed in their scripts. Students are also expected to bring a draft of a script they plan to shoot to the first class meeting.
Film 346
Surrealism and Cinema
This course traces the connections between surrealism and film culture, ranging from early 20th-century European experimental films to the narrative features of Luis Buñuel and Cinema Novo to Japanese avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Through this spectrum of case studies, the course frames the critical project of surrealism as both an aesthetic discourse and a theoretical endeavor extending across the fields of art history, cinema studies, psychoanalysis, materialist philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Readings include works by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, André Breton, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Williams, and Fatimah Rony. Open to Upper College and qualified students by permission of the instructor.
Film 362
Electronic Discourses: Art and the Internet
An examination of the electronic networks of contemporary digital culture and its recent past, this course explores a variety of information systems, virtual communities, and online art projects and examines them critically in readings from cultural theory, policy, history, and aesthetics. Each student is expected to design and mount an online project.
400-level courses
Film 405
Senior Seminar
This seminar, a requirement for all majors in the Film and Electronic Arts Program, is an opportunity to share working methods, knowledge, skills, and resources among students working on Senior Projects. The course includes sessions with visiting film and videomakers, who discuss their processes and techniques; a life-after-Bard skills workshop; a review of grant opportunities; and critiques of works in progress.
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