CHIN 2088/FMST 2220 — New Chinese Cinema

Thursdays 2:00 PM to 5:30 PM, 548 William Pitt Union with Kun Qian

This course introduces different ways of reading Chinese cinemas in greater China region (Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), specifically focusing on issues related to history, modernity, spatial and temporal representations of national, gender, and cultural identities. Well-known Chinese directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Edward Yang, and Wong Kar-wai will be studied through the 1980s and 1990s "New Wave Cinemas." We will also study the distinct techniques and styles of the rising "Sixth Generation" directors (such as Jiang Wen, Li Yang, Jia Zhangke) to see how key values of traditional Chinese culture and society have been contested and reinvented under the global conditions.

COMMRC 2226 Media and Cultural Studies: Political Economy and/vs. Cultural Studies

Thursdays 6:00 PM to 8:55 PM, WEB based class with Brenton Malin

This course explores a range of cultural studies approaches to media studies, giving special attention to the overlapping and competing paradigms of political economic studies stressing the industrial forces structuring the media and popular culture studies stressing the powers of texts and audiences. Moving through a set of foundational cultural studies theories—drawn from such areas as Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and the Frankfurt school—we will seek to understand how a range of scholars have negotiated these tensions between the economic imperatives of the media industry and the representational practices of media texts and audiences themselves. How did these earlier theorists understand the relationships between economic, cultural, and technological dimensions of mediated communication? To what extent do these theories help us to understand later developments within media culture and economics? How might they be extended or amended to better do so? In pursuing these questions, we will pair foundational readings with contemporary applications of and responses to these early theories. In the process, we will engage a number of debates that continue to haunt media and cultural studies theorists and situate these debates both against their historical backdrops and within our own presumably digital moment.

ENGFLM 2452/FMST 2152 — Film History/Theory 2

Tuesdays 9:00 AM to 12:50 PM, WEB-based class with Nancy Condee

This seminar will focus on the history and theory of cinema from 1960 to the present. While individual theorists and historians are discussed, special attention is paid to historical and theoretical arguments within film studies (psychoanalysis, spectatorship; apparatus theory; genre theory, new media, including video games). These arguments will be explored through major film movements and film-makers, taking up topics such as international art cinema, the Hollywood studio system, political cinema, and documentaries.

ENGFLM 2493 — Media/Ecology

Mondays 6:00 PM to 8:50 PM, 512 Cathedral of Learning with Zach Horton

This seminar with explore media theory and practice through the lens of ecology. From the late twentieth century to the present, ecology as a scientific discipline and set of cultural narratives has risen to the forefront of knowledge production as a way to study and understand complex biological systems, their environments, and their internal dynamics. During the same period, media systems have grown exponentially in complexity until they too have begun to exhibit some of the behaviors of ecological systems, including self-organization, feedback, evolution, and emergent properties. The term "media ecology" captures both this new, nonlinear systems approach to understanding media itself as well as the intersection between natural ecosystems, the technological assemblages with which they are intertwined, and the human (and non-human) subjects that are produced molded within these structures. This seminar will explore both media that interface with natural ecosystems as well as works and theory that approach mediation from an ecological and systems theoretical perspective. The secret life of information, contagious media, and the post-natural ecologies of our present and future will challenge us to conceive of Media and Ecology as a single coupled system: the emblem of our contemporary environment and an important frontier in media studies of the present. [Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome. Participants may optionally produce creative projects in lieu of a seminar paper, in any medium.]

FR 2648 – Contemporary French Cinema: Horror and the Questions of Genre in French Cinema

Thursdays, 1:00 PM to 4:50 PM, WEB based class with David Pettersen

“The weakness of the European film industries is that they cannot rely on genres for current production. […] [O]ne of the problems of the French cinema may arise from its inability to sustain good basic genres that thrive, the way they do in America.” André Bazin, “Six Characters in Search of Auteurs” (1957). 

Critics have not always agreed with Bazin’s characterization of the French film industry, and even those who have pursued the idea have not come to consensus about the reasons for the French industry’s seeming aversion towards genre filmmaking. Possible explanations include a lack of infrastructure, insufficient capitalization, and inadequate industry regulation. Many of Bazin’s young collaborators at the Cahiers du cinéma, and those that followed them, took the opposite view, preferring to see this “weakness” as a strength in that it represented a cultural rejection of industrial scales of film production for artisanal modes of filmmaking that favored a more artistic and diverse cinema. However, these various positions do not mean that the French cinema lacks a history of genre filmmaking and of engaging with genre. This course will offer an alternative trajectory through French film history oriented around one of the most marginalized of film genres, horror. As we will see, genre films in France rarely limit themselves to one genre, and so we will examine other genres that abut and mix with horror, including film noir, the suspense thriller, and science fiction. We will also consider alternative genealogies for thinking about horror in France focusing around the notion of le fantastique. We will begin with some early and isolated instances of genre filmmaking in the silent and early sound period (Méliès, Feuillade, and Dreyer) and then move to post-WWII efforts into film noir, the suspense thriller, and horror (Melville, Dassin, Clouzot, and Becker). We will then consider the French New Wave in the 1960s and investigate auteurist engagements with science fiction and horror (Franju, Marker, Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais) before working our way towards the contemporary period. Here, we will examine how French efforts in genre filmmaking interact with the global marketplace and transnational trends in horror, science fiction, and film policier (Besson, Gans, Gens, Kassovitz, Aja, Chapiron, Laugier, Maury, Fargeat, and Bustillo) and how contemporary French directors in the auteurist and art cinema tradition work in and with European and transnational genres (Denis, Noé, Dumont, de Van, Assayas, and Ducournau). Finally, we will look at how France has been a part of the migration of horror into long-form serial television in the 2010s. The course will offer a theoretical and historical investigation of what genre means in the French context but also an examination of how French filmmakers have used genre codes in distinctive ways to explore other concerns including cinematic spectatorship, embodiment, violence, politics, and questions of national belonging, class, race, gender, and sexuality. The course will be taught in English and most readings will be available in English. 

JPNSE 2057/FMST 2235 — Japanese Culture and Society Thrugh Cinema

Wednesdays, 10:00 AM to 12:50 PM, 121 Alumni Hall with Charles Exley

RUSS 2639 — Soviet Cinema 1934-1953: Stalin at the Movies

Wednesdays 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM, 5200 Posvar Hall with Volodia Padunov

The imposition in 1934 of socialist realism as the exclusive method available to soviet cultural producers and the release of the Vasil'ev brothers’ Chapaev later that year permanently transformed the soviet film industry. Stalin established total control of the industry both by appointing his personal representatives to control all stages of film production and by consolidating himself as "spectator number one," not only prescreening all films prior to their release, but eventually by establishing himself as a dominant presence on the silver screen. Films to be screened include Alexandrov's Circus (1936), Kozintsev and Trauberg's "Maxim trilogy" (1935-39), Dovzhenko's Aerograd (1935), Dzigan's We Are from Kronstadt (1936), Romm's Lenin in October (1937), Lukov's Two Soldiers (1943), Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944-46), Pyr'ev's Cossacks of the Kuban (1949), and Chiaureli's trilogy devoted to comrade Stalin (1946, 1949, and 1951).