Undergraduate Program

As an introduction to the art of film, this course will present the concepts of film form, film aesthetics, and film style, while remaining attentive to the various ways in which cinema also involves an interaction with audiences and larger social structures.

Location

Morey Room 321 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course introduces the basic aesthetic and technical elements of video production. Emphasis is on the creative use and understanding of the video medium while learning to use the video camera, video editing processes and the fundamental procedures of planning video projects. Strategies for the use of video as an art-making tool will be explored. Works by artists and directors critically exploring media of film and video will be viewed and discussed. Video techniques will be studied through screenings, group discussions, readings, practice sessions and presentations of original video projects made during the course. Sophomores and Juniors with officially declared FMS and SA majors are given priority registration; followed by sophomores and juniors with officially declared FMS and SA minors. Studio arts supplies fee: $75. To be added to the rolling waiting list contact Jason Middleton.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

The course examines the use advertisers make of language in selling their products and how it affects our perceptions of the product and ourselves. The emphasis in the course is on learning about the structure of language and how we can use it as a guide to observing and understanding the effectiveness of commercial messages.

Location

Hylan Building Room 306 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course merges contemporary art production with technologies and social interventions. Students will combine historical, inter-media approaches with new, evolving trends in social practice. Studio assignments will use language, performance, programming, moving images, and more as tools and as media to construct creative-situations that prompt dialogue and critique. Special emphasis will be placed on introductory techniques that move beyond the studio and into collaborative, participatory, community-based productions. Not open to seniors.

Studio Art lab supply fees apply. If the course fills and you would like to be added to the wait list, please go to https://www.sageart.center/resources.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (TR 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This course introduces students to the rich body of disaster literature and cinema in Japan. We will explore how Japanese artists creatively reflected on themes of loss, grief, trauma, survival, and healing; we will critically analyze how disaster writings and films probe the issues of socio-political infrastructure as well as human pain and strength. Described as events that cause “the breach of collective expectations in institutions and practices that make everyday life work” (Curato and Corpus Ong 2015), the “disasters” we encounter in this class include both natural and human-generated calamities such as fire, earthquake, war, atomic bombing, and epidemic. Also covered in this class are writings on “imagined disasters” as found in science fiction and dystopian fantasy (for example, the 1973 novel Japan Sinks by Komatsu Sakyō and its parody “The World Sinks Except Japan” by Tsutsui Yasutaka).

All readings will be in English; knowledge of Japanese language is welcome but not required

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 420 (TR 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

This course explores Hollywood's fascination with race and gender as social issues and as spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in US culture, we analyze popular films from the 1950s to the present.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Students will create and perform multi-media site-specific choreography and installations that will be captured and re-mixed. Geared for students of dance, film and photography, this course will explore creative collaboration, composition, lens based art and post-production. Students will be encouraged to curiously and playfully embody manipulations of movement material and play with technology to better understand different points of view and to explore the elements of site, space, shape, time and effort to see how they affect quality and content. Students will gain hands-on experience with digital photo and video equipment and editing software, and will serves roles both in front of and behind the camera. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (TR 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course introduces students to the poetics of television. We will explore the ways that television tells stories, creates characters, and constructs worlds; the significance of genre, style, and form to those stories, characters, and worlds; and the relationship between television and the horizons of social, historical, and aesthetic experience that television opens as one of the most important culture industries of the last 100 years. Much of our class will be devoted to watching TV and discussing what we watch, especially scripted television such as sitcoms, soap operas, procedurals, “quality” television, web series, and so on. Students will also come to understand poetics, a method that goes back to Aristotle, as an approach useful to the study of any medium, especially when combined with methods enabled by digital technologies. 

Location

Lechase Room 163 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

From rom coms, musical comedies, and sitcoms to tragicomedy, satire, and slapstick, many versions of comedy have made us laugh out loud or smile sardonically from the ancients to the moderns. While this history will have a place in our course, we will primarily investigate comedy in film and television of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore critical issues related to comedy, including the function and meaning of laughter and jokes; moments of comic relief; the relationship of comedy to community and crisis; love, sexuality, and romance; the role of the body and whether comedy is a "body genre"; how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class get messily mediated by comedy; the difference of comedy from other modes such as tragedy, horror, and realism; and the varying tones comedy can have from dark to light, serious to fun, and comforting to disturbing. Preference will be given to English, Digital Media Studies, and Film & Media Studies majors fulfilling a requirement.

Location

Morey Room 403 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

How do cyborgs, superheroes, and ghosts change our understanding of what it means to be human? How do interstellar travel, dystopian climate change, and revisionist ancient histories reframe the way we think of African diasporic histories of trauma, survival, desired freedom, and collective belonging? Studying science fiction, fantasy, and horror from across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, this course will focus on how 20th and 21st century artists have reimagined black life after slavery and empire. We’ll study a range of artistic forms, including fiction, film, visual art, and music, by artists like Octavia Butler, Wanuri Kahiu, Nalo Hopkinson, Jordan Peele, and Wangechi Mutu. We’ll look at how artists of color contort the world we know, and how they use the speculative mode to pose deeply philosophical and historical questions.

Location

Goergen Hall Room 110 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course explores the reception of the Greek and Roman worlds in modern film. Students will view a diverse collection of movies that draw on the narratives and traditions of the ancient Mediterranean. They will consider how ancient mythology, history, and drama informed the development of cinema and how cinematic portrayals of the ancient world can provide valuable frameworks for understanding a variety of modern contexts. Students will develop a core knowledge of Graeco-Roman antiquity and its reception in film and hone their writing and critical thinking skills. The course assumes no previous knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Location

Lechase Room 103 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Italian Neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s constituted Italian cinema’s greatest contribution to filmmaking worldwide and to the history of cinema. This course will provide students with a solid understanding of Neorealist themes and style through the exploration of its three principal directors: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. Discussion topics will range from the Nazi occupation of Italy and the Partisan Resistance, to southern Italy and postwar living conditions. Films include: Rome Open City, Paisan, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D., The Earth Trembles and Bellissima. Assignments include: historical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles. 

Location

Morey Room 502 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting.

Location

Hylan Building Room 102 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course provides a transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema during this period, we will address a number of aesthetic and technological issues. For example, how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores video art processes with an emphasis on contemporary practice, emerging trends, and digital technologies. Students will consider time-based digital objects and sound from artistic perspectives that question and interrupt conventional narrative forms while embracing experimental techniques. Original projects may involve installation, single channel, sound, and networked environments. Works will be examined within a critical framework of readings, critiques, and viewings. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

An introduction and practice to writing professionally formatted scripts used in short films and webisodes. Emphasis will be placed on writing short-form scripts and how to discuss and analyze key elements of scriptwriting and visual storytelling.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

The category of “guilt” floats between theology, psychology, and criminology. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a purported objective condition, guilt stars in big stories moderns tell about what it is to be a member of a society, what it is to be a religious person, and how it feels to be a creature with sexual appetites. Meanwhile, for legal and mental health professions, proof of guilt is used to sort the good from the bad, the normal from the deviant, and the socially respectable from the socially disposable. Not all is so dour, however. Guilt lives in confession, denunciation, and in criminal sentencing, but it is also the stuff of jokes, of ethnic pride, and of eroticism. Toward an anatomy of guilt, in this course we will draw on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Janet Malcolm and Sarah Schulman, and we will wrestle with the films—and complicated legacies—of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, two filmmakers who are preoccupied with (and implicated by) guilt, as feeling and as fact.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Our lives are full of repetition – things we do as part of our daily routine, but also repetition in the form of practice is the way we learn a language, learn a sport, and learn a particular skill. This class will investigate how thinking about learning as practice provides us with ways of thinking about knowledge as something that is experienced and embodied, rather than acquired and possessed. We will explore what it means to come back to a film or a text throughout the course of the semester, but also look at the ways in which various artists and theorists use repetition to explore and engage with a particular idea or topic. In English

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (M 3:25PM - 6:05PM)

This introductory course uses film and the film industry to understand several trends and elements central to Latin American society and culture in the twentieth century. Students will engage the tension of film's role in teaching history, and telling untold stories, alongside the medium's limitations. The class will be structured around five main themes: Latin America and the United States; Class, Race and Gender; Revolution and Repression; Underdevelopment and Informality; and (Im)migration. By the end of the course, students will have a strong introduction to modern Latin American history.

Location

Meliora Room 205 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

A focused study of Godzilla on film, from the original 1954 film that defined Japan's kaiju film to today. Broader course context includes an investigation of the 1950s science fiction/horror/creature-feature genre popularized during the heyday of the Cold War nuclear age but dating back to silent cinema, and a comparative study of the visual culture of war from WWII to today. Seminal sci-fi titles influencing the Godzilla film paradigm and close readings of select Godzilla universe films reveal the historical and social contexts for the Godzilla franchise's erratic trajectory since 1954. We watch both dubbed and subtitled original Japanese language versions of select titles to better understand how different culturally generated perspectives of Godzilla emerge. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This course explores Hollywood's fascination with race and gender as social issues and as spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in US culture, we analyze popular films from the 1950s to the present.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

A transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema, we will address aesthetic and technological issues. i.e. how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect Cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

A focused study of Godzilla on film, from the original 1954 film that defined Japan's kaiju film to today. Broader course context includes an investigation of the 1950s science fiction/horror/creature-feature genre popularized during the heyday of the Cold War nuclear age but dating back to silent cinema, and a comparative study of the visual culture of war from WWII to today. Seminal sci-fi titles influencing the Godzilla film paradigm and close readings of select Godzilla universe films reveal the historical and social contexts for the Godzilla franchise's erratic trajectory since 1954. We watch both dubbed and subtitled original Japanese language versions of select titles to better understand how different culturally generated perspectives of Godzilla emerge. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)