Tri-College Courses

CURRENT COURSE OFFERINGS

Bryn Mawr
Haverford
Swarthmore
Tri-Co Course Guide
University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies

BRYN MAWR FALL 2008
ENGL 238 (HART 238). History of Cinema, 1895-1945
ENGL 239 (HART 239). Women and Cinema: Social Agency and Cultural Representation
ENGL 324: Shakespeare on Film
ENGL 334 (HART 334). Topics in Film Studies: Queer Cinema
GERM 262: Foreign Affairs: Travel in Post-War German and Austrian Film
HART 308: Topics in Photography: Photography and War

HAVERFORD FALL 2008
ICPR 224a. Seeing Class: Film and Social Class in America

SWARTHMORE FALL 2008
GERM 54 (FMST91). German Cinema

BRYN MAWR SPRING 2009
ENGL 205 (HART 205). Introduction to Film and Media Studies
ENGL 229. Movies and Mass Politics
ENGL 257. Gender and Technology
HART 110. Identification in the Cinema
HART 271. "The American Century": Photography in the United States and its History

ENGL 341. Cult Genres: Camp, Kitsch, and Trash Cinema

 

HAVERFORD SPRING 2009
ICPR 278b. Documentary Film and Approaches to Truth

PREVIOUSLY OFFERED COURSES
Bryn Mawr
Haverford
Swarthmore

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ENG 306 Film Theory

Professor Homay King

This course is an introduction to major developments in film theory and criticism. Topics covered include: the specificity of film form; cinematic realism; the cinematic "author"; the politics and ideology of cinema; the relation between cinema and language; spectatorship, identification and subjectivity; archival and historical problems in film studies; the relation between film studies and other disciplines of aesthetic and social criticism. Each week of the syllabus pairs critical writing(s) on a central principle of film analysis with a cinematic example. Class will be divided between discussion of critical texts and attempts to apply them to a primary cinematic text. (staff, Division III; cross-listed as COML B306 and HART B306) Not offered in 2006-07.

ENG 323 Movies, Fascism & Communism

Professor Michael Tratner

New Course: The movies and mass politics emerged together, altering entertainment and government in strangely similar ways.  Fascism and Communism claimed an inherent relation to the masses and hence to movies; Hollywood rejected such claims.  We will  examine films alluding to fascism or communism, to understand them as commenting on political debates and on the mass experience of moviegoing.

HART 337 Contemplating Art Cinema: Michael Haneke, Claire Denis & the Dardenne Brothers

Professor Elena Gorfinkel

This course considers the provocative films of the international art cinema auteurs Michael Haneke, Claire Denis and Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne. While these directors each come from specific nations and socio-cultural contexts - Austria, France, and Belgium respectively - this class looks at the affinities between their work, their styles and their thematic and formal preoccupations. All of these directors have Francophone affiliations and are indebted in some respects to traditions of cinematic realism - Italian Neorealism, Cinema Verité, French Poetic Realism, & documentary forms – as well as to Post-War Modernism and the international avant-gardes. However, Haneke, Denis and the Dardenne brothers transform the conventions of a merely "observational" realism, problematizing the very nature of "the real." They defy the *sine qua non* of narrative closure, refusing to indulge in the character psychology and easy identification so central to mainstream Hollywood classicism. Instead, their rich, complexly textured and visually challenging films return the work of art to the domain of the spectator – forcing the film audience to make sense of and understand the "world viewed" in all its material fragments. In their radical fusion of form and content, Haneke's, Denis' and the Dardenne brothers' films simultaneously operate as a "corporeal cinema" and a supremely philosophical body of work. Defined by both implicit and explicit social critique, striking formal composition, visceral use of the mobile camera, elliptical narrative organization, peopled with protagonists who defy normative behavior, and are figured as "others," foreigners, strangers, the detached, and the alien(ated), their films ask fundamental questions about what it means to be ethically human in a hyper-capitalist and post-colonial age. The films we will see reflect on the landscape of an emergent "Neo-Europe" whose identity is continually being redefined by the lingering legacies and ramifications of colonialism, the Holocaust, the fall of Communism, the rise of neo-liberal capitalism and globalization. Assignments for this course will include: weekly screening/reading journals, in-class presentations, and a final longer research paper. Screenings to include: *Code Unknown, Funny Games, Cache, Beau Travail, I Can't Sleep, No Fear No Die, Chocolat, La Promesse, The Son, Rosetta*. Weekly screening/reading journals: 1 single spaced typed page each, 10 out of 14 weeks = 10 pages In Class Presentation: 10-15 minutes Final Research Paper: 15 pages (cross-listed as HART337)

HART 661 Film Theory Graduate Seminar

Professor Homay King

This course provides graduate students with a solid background in the
key primary texts of film theory, starting with Hugo Munsterberg's
1916 treatise on the silent photoplay and concluding with contemporary
writings on film and phenomenology. Our primary method of inquiry
will be careful close analysis of these texts. The course is
organized around the tension between realism and formalism which
characterizes much of the history of film theory. We will also engage
in an ongoing discussion of psychoanalytic theory's relationship to
film studies. Weekly film screenings will serve to illustrate (or
complicate) theoretical concepts. This is not a survey course in film
critical methodologies - students will be discouraged from "applying"
the texts to films in a unilateral way. This course is restricted to
graduate students.

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BRYN MAWR FALL 2007 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS


ITA 225 Italy at War: 20th Century Italian Literature & Cinema

Professor Roberta Ricci

A survey, taught in English but also valid for Italian languages credit for those who qualify to do reading and writing in Italian, of Italian cinema with emphasis placed on its relation to literature. The course will discuss how cinema conditions literary imagination and how literature leaves its imprint on cinema. We will "read" films as "literary images" and "see" novels as "visual stories." The reading of the literary sources will be followed by evaluation of the corresponding films (all subtitled) by well-known directors, including Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Rosi, the Taviani brothers and L. Visconti. (Ricci) Not offered in 2006-07.

ENG 239 Women and Cinema:Social Agency and Cultural Representation

Professor Elena Gorfinkel

While women have worked in all sectors of film production, this course specifically considers the legacies of women film directors within the history of cinema and into the present. This class will examine the particular challenges that women filmmakers face, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. This class will also introduce students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s and into the present, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production, and with a focus on the question of female authorship. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life and social experience? How does an audience assess a film made by a woman as explicitly or implicitly feminist? Analyzing the work of female filmmakers who have broken with or resist classical Hollywood cinematic conventions, this course will address the relationship between film form and ideology. We will also look at how the current "post-feminist" moment has inflected women's cultural production. Discussing directors such as Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Arzner, Barbara Loden, Chantal Akerman, Vera Chytilova, Cheryl Dunye, Lizzie Borden, as well as the more recent productions of Catherine Breillat, Lynne Ramsay, and Miranda July, this course will take a retrospective and prospective vantage point on the relationship between different generations of women's films and feminist theories within the broader cultural contexts of the feminist movement, gay, lesbian, and queer theories, and developments in the fields of race, class and post-colonialism. Weekly Screening/Reading Journal: 7 out of 14 weeks = 7 pages Short Response Paper: 4-5 pages In Class Presentation: 5 minutes Final Paper: 10 pages (cross-listed as HART239)

GERM 245 Approaches to German Literature and Culture/ Sexuality & Gender in German Literature & Film

Professor Imke Meyer

Course content varies. Previous topics include: Women's Narratives on Modern Migrancy, Exile and Diaspora; Sexuality and Gender in German Literature and Film. (Meyer, Division III; cross-listed as COML B245) Cross listed as COML B245, HART B244
Enrollment limited to 25 students.Counts toward Film Studies minor.

HART 299 History of Cinema 1945-present

Professor Homay King

This course surveys the history of narrative film from 1945 through contemporary cinema. We will analyze a chronological series of styles and national cinemas, including classical Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and other post-war movements and genres. Viewings of canonical films (Bicycle Thieves, Vertigo) will be supplemented by more recent examples of global cinema. While historical in approach, this course emphasizes the theory and criticism of the sound film, and we will consider various methodological approaches to the aesthetic, socio-political, and psychological dimensions of cinema. Readings will provide historical context, and will introduce students to key concepts in film studies such as realism, formalism, spectatorship, the auteur theory, and genre studies. This course fulfills the history requirement for the Film Studies Minor.

ENG 341 Cult Genres: Camp, Kitsch and Trash Cinema

Professor Elena Gorfinkel

What is cult cinema? Despite its cultural pervasiveness as the outsider art of film practice, cult films are often difficult to define or categorize aesthetically. Often discussed inseparably from the devoted fans which constitute their diverse publics, cult films are tied in their individualistic and defiantly marginal stance to a group of consumers who reject accepted norms of cinematic value. Whether certain cult films are self-designated, or whether they are reclaimed by an alternative audience who sees worth in what mainstream cinema-goers have found unpalatable or distasteful, the "culture of cult" requires a more attentive approach. Serving as a theorization and historicization of many cult genres this course will examine issues of taste, aesthetics, reception and audiences, mass culture, gender/sexuality, race and class as they pertain to the practices of meaning production in cult cinemas. This class aims to explore the categories and knowledges that have accrued around cult movements such as the midnight movie, the cult horror film, sexploitation, underground and camp cinema. Using the diffracting terminology of *camp* value and revaluation, *kitsch* and the critique of mass production, and *trash*, in its homage to the discarded, the unusable/useless/obsolete, and its championing of the notion of the image that is beyond redemption, the scheduled readings and screenings will call upon students to develop their own theories of the historical development and aesthetic transformation of the cult film experience over the past 50 years. What does the cult film as incomparable "bad object" teach us about aesthetic judgment, taste, and traditions of filmgoing? How do cult films customarily exploit and trouble genre conventions? And is cult or camp still an applicable framework for understanding excessive texts and their cinephile audiences in the contemporary moment and in light of changing moving image technologies, from the VCR to You Tube? Assignments will include a screening/reading journal, in-class presentations, and final research paper. Screenings to include: Maniac, Showgirls, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Cobra Woman, Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Trekkies,Rumble in the Bronx, and others. Requirements: Weekly screening/reading journals: 1 single spaced typed page each, 10 out of 14 weeks = 10 pages In Class Presentation: 10-15 minutes Final Research Paper: 15 pages (cross-listed as HART341)

ENG 349 Theories of Authorshipin the Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock

Professor Homay King

Cinema is in many senses an authorless medium. Scholars frequently refer to the studio system, the collaborative nature of film production, and the mass-marketing of genre films to suggest how cinema resists Romantic notions of authorship. Nevertheless, the auteur theory persists as an organizing principle of film history and criticism. In this course, we will trace the auteur theory from Rudolf Arnheim and the Cahiers du Cinéma to contemporary examples of author-based criticism. We will also read theoretical texts that propose ways to conceptualize the authoring subject without recourse to a notion of a solitary, inspired creator. This semester, the films of Alfred Hitchcock will provide a case study, and we will explore the benefits and limitations of various theories of authorship in reference to his oeuvre. Screenings will include Suspicion, Stage Fright, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Marnie, and others. Enrollment limited to 15. Preference given to declared History of Art Majors, English Majors, and Film Studies Minors. Prerequisite: HART 110, ENGL 205, or HART 299.

This seminar explores the cultural and theoretical trends that have shaped Russian and Soviet cinema from the silent era to the present day. The focus will be on Russia's films and film theory, with discussion of the aesthetic, ideological, and historical issues underscoring Russia's cinematic culture. No previous study of cinema required, although Russian 201 or the equivalent is required.


ENG 317 Exhibition & Inhibition: Movies, Pleasure, & Social Control

This course is a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to go to the movies. In it, we investigate the changing nature of the cinema in society-including all cinematic modes of display and exhibition, spanning pre-cinematic visual technologies to more recent film and video practices. The goal of the course is to provide both historical and technological frameworks for examining transformations in acceptable viewing habits and viewing experiences, from the early cinema to the current moment. Areas covered will include early cinema and viewing devices, storefront kinetoscopes, audience segregation, film censorship and the reform movement, the Hollywood production code, movie theatre architecture, fan cultures of various kinds, journalistic and narrative accounts of movie going, and the shift from analog to digital images. Readings from film and cultural theory on mass spectacle, the observer, the spectator, and the mass audience will shape our discussion and guide our individual research. Cross-listed with HART B317 (Horne)



HART 110 Identification in the Cinema

This course will explore the concept of spectatorship, from notions of passive observation to active/interactive mass participation. Though we will focus mainly on the traditions of the centered and unifying gaze of the viewer as presented by camera-based arts and media, we will also examine transformations in the address and reception of visual information. This course will introduce students to basic skills of visual analysis and the critical vocabularies in visual cultural studies and film studies. (Horne)



ENG 285 Contemporary International Film

This is a course in contemporary world cinema or non-Hollywood cinemas, which means films that are made geographically far from Hollywood and films which have adopted a different aesthetic model of filmmaking from Hollywood. We will examine various ways in which cinema has attempted to come to terms with Hollywood, as well as an equally powerful tendency in such films to explore the poetics of cinema independent of Hollywood influences. Counts toward the Film Studies Minor. Cross listed with ENGL B285 and HART B285. (Mazaj)



ENG 287 Media Culture & Movies

What happens when the media see themselves in the mirror? This question is the premise of this course, a study of how films have become Media Movies, a strange but powerful body of films which make us think of the media culture. This self-critique, it turns out, is a healthy preoccupation of quite a few films, which embody the philosophical crises in our media culture, and which reflect thoughtfully on the nature of our lives, the structure of our values and the spirit of our culture. Cross listed as HART B287. (Mazaj)



ENG 348 Cinema and Popular Memory

This course is a broad and eclectic introduction into the relationship between cinema, history, and popular memory. It explores a diverse range of films which claim to show that film can express and also shape popular memory, and pays special attention to the manner in which films write and rewrite history by articulating and shaping such memory. The course will be based on a premise that cinema shapes or negotiates the vision of who we are as individuals, groups and larger collectivities.
Counts toward the Film Studies Minor. Cross listed as COML B348 and HART B346. (Mazaj)



SPAN318 Adaptaciones literarias en el cine español

Film adaptations of literary works have been popular since the early years of cinema in Spain. This course examines the relationship between films and literature, focusing on the theory and practice of film adaptation. Attention will be paid to the political and cultural context in which these texts are being published and made into films. Please Note that there is a prerequisite of one 200-level course in Spanish for entry into this course. (Song)



English 238: Silent Cinema: International Film to 1930

It is recommended that students take Engl/HArt 205 or Engl/HArt 299 before taking this course. Students who took English 238: Silent Cinema Fall 2003 may register for this course with approval of instructor and Director of Film Studies. NB: Attendance at screenings mandatory. This course surveys the history of cinema as commercial product and specific cultural form, from the years surrounding the technological advent of moving images to just before the commercial addition of synchronous sound. An overview of the rise of national cinemas in the silent era, we will discuss the major aesthetic movements and film traditions of the period, particularly as they pertain to changes in social and cultural contexts of cinema. In addition, this course will incorporate accounts of cinema presented in audience ethnographies, the documentary history of the cinema, and film publicity. Readings: The Oxford History of World Cinema edited by Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Film History by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Five Faces of Modernity by Matei Calinescu, and a course packet. Graded Assignments: Weekly screening notebook, 7 short response papers, Mid-Term Film Analysis (5 pages), Final Essay (8 pages). (Horne)



English 291: Documentary Film and Media

Cross-listed with HART. Limited to 30 students; preference may be given to Film Studies minors, and to students who have taken English/HArt 205 (Introduction to Film) or HArt/English 299 (History of Narrative Cinema). Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory. This course will explore the history and theory of the documentary mode in cinema and other audiovisual media. Readings and weekly screenings will survey the international history and development of the documentary genre, from the actualities and newsreels of the early years of cinema to the reality TV and amateur video of the present. This range of materials will help us pose critical questions about the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of documentary in all its guises: as knowledge; as artifact, souvenir, or memory; as propaganda or social activism; and as entertainment. We will develop formal and theoretical methods of analysis, in order to ask what gives these diverse forms the impression of truth, authenticity, or immediacy. And moreover, we will go on to ask: what do these reality effects tell us about the world filmed? Assignments will include: regular critical writing in response to readings and screenings; class presentation(s); two critical essays. (Students may be given the option to produce a work of documentary in place of one critical essay.)
(Kahana)



English 306: Film Theory

Cross-listed with HART. Prerequisites: Engl 205 or HArt 299.
English and History of Art seniors and juniors. N.B. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory. This course is an introduction to major developments in film theory and criticism. Topics covered will include: the specificity of film form; cinematic realism; the politics and ideology of cinema; the relation between cinema and language; spectatorship, identification, and subjectivity; archival and historical problems in film studies; the relation between film studies and other disciplines of aesthetic and social criticism. Each week of the syllabus pairs critical writing(s) on a central principle of film analysis with a cinematic example of this principle. Class time will be divided between discussion of the critical texts and attempts to apply them to a primary cinematic text. We will end the course by considering a number of recent attempts to "practice" film theory in audio-visual form. A background in film studies is not essential for participation in the seminar; however, some previous experience with literary theory, visual theory, semiotics, cultural theory, philosophy, or psychoanalysis is a plus. Requirements: Five short (2-3 page) critical response papers and one research essay (15 pages) on a suitable topic, developed in consultation with the instructor. (Horne)



HART 299: Introduction to Narrative Cinema

In this course, we will survey the history of narrative film language from the beginning of the sound era through the 1980s. We will analyze a chronological series of film styles and national movements, including various Hollywood film genres, Italian Neo realism, the French New Wave, and the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s. Our focus will be on western cinema, but we will turn our attention to films from other parts of the world as well. While historical in approach, this course emphasizes the theory and criticism of the sound film, and we will consider various methodological approaches to the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and psychological dimensions of the film medium. In addition to film screenings, there will be ample amounts of reading, in-class collective sequence analysis, and discussion of topics in film theory ranging from André Bazin's writings on Charlie Chaplin to feminist theories of cinematic voyeurism. Films to be screened include Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thief, Vertigo, Chungking Express, and others. Two papers, two exams, participation. Required Texts: Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (7th edition); David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (4th edition); (King)



HART 349: Theories of Authorship in the Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock

Carp B15 Cross-listed with English and Comp Lit. Limited to 15. Prerequisite: ENGL 205, HART 110, or HART 299. Preference will be given to junior and senior majors and film minors. Screenings are mandatory.
Cinema resists being thought of in terms of traditional notions of authorship. Scholars have frequently cited the collaborative nature of the medium, its commercial underpinnings, and its reliance on analogic modes of representation as evidence of its "unauthored" qualities. Nevertheless, the author-director remains one of the primary categories through which we understand film. In this course, we will examine the "auteur theory" of the cinema in its various incarnations, from Rudolf Arnheim's 1930s polemic to the Cahiers du Cinéma politiques des auteurs. We will explore the limits and possibilities of these theories, considering all the while how cinema poses a challenge to conventional attributes of the author: solitary genius, originality, consistency of theme and style across a body of work, an assertion of mastery over the text, and so on. In addition, this course will take director Alfred Hitchcock as a case study of auteurism; screenings of films from The Lodger (1927) to Marnie (1964) and critical readings on the director will supplement our theoretical discussions. Requirements: Short paper, long research paper, participation. Required texts: Burke, Sean, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader; Caughie, John. Theories of Authorship; Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock; Blackboard readings TBA. (King)



RUSS 252: Soviet Cinema: The Masterpieces of Russian and Soviet Cinema

This course explores the major trends that shaped Russian and Soviet cinema and its rapid development from the 1910s to the present day. With pre-Revolutionary Russian film adapting theatrical and literary modes to suit the new art form, Soviet cinema blossomed in the 1920s with its bold, groundbreaking innovations before giving way to a longer, less experimental period of Socialist Realism. Only in the late 1950s did a "thaw" period allow for a loosening of artistic restrictions, a creative freedom that increased with the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In this course, we will focus on films from all of these periods, showing how originality and Russian aesthetic traditions managed to prevail despite the political and monetary restrictions that have plagued Russian and Soviet cinema since its inception. Films include Battleship Potemkin, The Man with the Movie Camera, Andrei Rublev, and Russian Ark. Readings include Jay Leyda's Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Andrei Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time, and Russian formalist film theory. Graded assignments: two short analytical assignments and a final research paper.
(Harte)



ENGL 205/HART 205: Introduction to Film Studies

Introduction to Film is intended to provide students with the basic tools of critical film analysis. Through close readings of images and sounds, sections of films, and entire narratives, students will cultivate the habits of critical viewing and establish a general foundation for more focused work in film and media studies. The course introduces both the formal and technical units of cinematic meaning and some broader categories of genre and history that, taken together, add up to the complex of experiences and meanings we call cinema. Although much of the course material will focus on the building blocks of the "classic" or Hollywood style of film language and narrative, examples will be drawn from across the generic and geographic range of the history of cinema. N.B.: Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory. (Kahana)



ENGL 329/HART 329: Screen Melodrama

Prerequisites: ENGL 205 or HART 299. Preference given to English and History of Art seniors and juniors. This course will explore the broad range of sentimental and sensationalist techniques used in the melodramatic mode of representation on screen. Our focus will be on the affective and spectacular strategies of film and television drama, and, in particular, narratives in which ethical or moral judgment result in redemption, salvation, or punishment. Topics to include: Hollywood's "woman's weepies", Bollywood spectacle, Race films, the culture of kitsch, the family romance, rescue fantasies, music and melodrama. Texts: Critical approaches to melodrama drawn from classical literary theory, psychoanalytic and classical film theory, feminist theory (represented by Peter Brooks, Marcia Landy, Ben Singer, Robert Lang, and Christine Gledhill, and Linda Williams), will inform our analysis. Films by: D.W. Griffith, C.W. Pabst, King Vidor, Vincente Minelli, Douglas Sirk, R.W. Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-Wai and others. Requirements: Five short (2-3 page) critical response papers and one research essay (15 pages) on a suitable topic, developed in consultation with the instructor. (Horne)



GERM 245/COML 245: Sexualities and Gender in 20th-Century German Literature and Film.

This seminar concerns itself with discourses on sexuality and gender advanced by German and Austrian literature and film in the 20th century. Our analyses of the visual and narrative construction of sexuality and of masculinity and femininity will be framed by the discussion of theoretical texts by authors such as Sigmund Freud, Siegfried Kracauer, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Adrienne Rich, Teresa De Lauretis, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Halberstam, and Tim Dean. We will screen G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box," Leontine Sagan's "Maedchen in Uniform," Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter," Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," Valie Export's "Menschenfrauen," and Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher." We will read literary texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Verena Stefan, and Elfriede Jelinek. Class discussions will be held in English. For German speakers, additional sessions conducted in German will be offered on a regular basis. Cross-listed with Feminist and Gender Studies. (Meyer)



GERM 299: Desires of Belonging: Germany and Diaspora Cultures

Please note: the class room site of this course will alternate between Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore. This course will focus on diasporic texts (including fiction, essays, autobiography, documentary and feature film) produced in German-speaking countries that represent a conscious effort to transmit cultural heritages of homelands left behind through acts of personal and collective memory. We will study exile as experience and metaphor in the context of our modernity and examine the structures of relationship between imagined/remembered homelands and transnational identities as well as the dialectics of language loss and bi- and multilingualism. At the beginning and end of our course, we will explore literary representations of Diaspora and exile that lay bare the traumatic outlines of European history, more specifically, the tragic vicissitudes of German-Jewish history. Another important component of the course will be a series of recent films that have at their center questions of national and ethnic identity, cultural and linguistic heritage, and community and personal memory. Exclusionary representations of others are articulated and critically analyzed in feature, documentary, and essay films by foreign directors working in German speaking countries. Primary texts, secondary literature, and films used in the course include texts by Robert Menasse, W. E. Sebald, E.S. Özdamar, Zafer Senocak, Rafik Schami, Libuse Monikova Herta Müller, and José Oliver. Critics read will include Iain Chambers, Thomas Elsaesser, Sabine Hake, Amin Maalouf and Hamid Naficy. Theoretical background includes texts by W. Benjamin, S. Freud, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, J. Lacan, S. Zizek. We will view films by Fatih Akin, Yilmaz Arslan, E. K. Ataman, Tevfik Baser and Harun Farocki. (Seyhan)



GERM 321/CITY 319: Berlin in the 1920's

This course will concern itself with films and literary works produced in and about Berlin in the 1920s, as well as the broader socio-historic context in which these works are situated. We will examine competing political discourses in the Weimar Republic and ask how and to what extent the unstable social and political climate of the time period is reflected in films, theater, and novels. Our discussions will be supported by theoretical texts by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Peter Gay, and Anton Kaes. We will screen Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and "M," Walter Ruttmann's "Berlin: Symphony of a City," Joseph von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel," G.W. Pabst's "The Threepenny Opera," and Leontine Sagan's "Maedchen in Uniform." We will read literary texts by Bertolt Brecht, Marieluise Fleisser, Alfred Doeblin, and Erich Kaestner. (Meyer)



ArtW 266: Screenwriting I

An introduction to the art and craft of screenwriting, with particular focus on the adaptation - the translation of literary work into film. A range of possible literary works will be discussed, including novels, short stories, graphic novels, and works of non-fiction. As students work on their own adaptations, we will link questions of storytelling - the significance of narrative, dramatic structure, character and theme - to the film medium and explore what makes film and writing for film unique. The lectures will explore the basic characteristics and mechanics of storytelling. Through reading works of prose and screening the films adapted from them, we will come to better understand the tools and dictates of film writing. The reading will include: Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster, The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, Ghost World , comic book and screenplay written by Daniel Clowes, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ) by Philip K. Dick, and Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar. Texts may also include selected reading from My Life and My Times by Jean Renoir, Bergman on Bergman by Ingmar Bergman, and Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe. Students will choose a work of literature - a novel, a short story, a work of non-fiction, a graphic novel - that they will adapt for the screen. In the course of the semester, we will analyze the work as students proceed towards a refined outline for a feature-length screenplay and a completed first act. Enrollment in this class is limited to 15 students. (Doye)

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HAVERFORD

SPAN 210 Spanish & Spanish American Film Studies

Professor Michelotti
Class: M, W 12:30 -2:00

Exploration of films in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic. The course will discuss approximately one movie per class, from a variety of directors, including Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Pedro Almodóvar, María Luisa Bemberg, Lucrecia Martel, Miguel Littín. The class will focus on the cinematic discourse as well as the cultural and historic background of each film. The course will also provide advanced language training with particular emphasis in refining oral and writing skills.

 

GERM 262 Global Masculinities: The Male Body in Contemporary Cinema

Professor TBA
Class: TH 1:30-4:00 pm
Room: TBA

This course will explore masculinity in a variety of national cinemas. What are the parameters for representations of male bodies in contemporary film? How do cinematic representations of male bodies differ from those of female bodies? Have the modes of representation shifted with the rise of a notion of a “global cinema”? How have the phenomena of feminism, post-feminism, globalization and new media influenced contemporary representations of maleness? We will read seminal Western texts on masculinity and visual representation (Lessing, Freud, Lacan, et al) as well as texts focusing on non-Western masculinities (Sinha, Eng, et al), and queer masculinities (Dean, Lane et al). Films by Alexander Payne, Andrei Zvyagintsev, R.W. Fassbinder, Park Chan-wook, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Pedro Almodovar, Yang Zhang, Alan Berliner, Nicole Kassell, among others.

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HAVERFORD PREVIOUSLY OFFERED COURSES


GERM 224 New German Cinema

Professor Chris Pavsek


This course will provide you a thorough introduction to the work of three of the most important filmmakers of the generation or two of filmmakers to come to prominence in Germany in the 1970s. This course is different than many film courses in that it will not provide a survey of a period or genre, but will instead take the time to delve in greater depth into the work of three very different artists. The course will be organized by filmmaker, but three main concerns will return throughout.
The general approach is to treat these filmmakers as intellectuals, as something like "visual philosophers" or "theorists' in their own right. That is, we will probe how they try to think via film (and video).



COMLH 210 Spanish and Spanish American Film Studies

Professor Graciela Michelotti


Exploration of films in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic. The course will discuss approximately one movie per class, from a variety of directors, including Luis Bunuel, Carlos Saura, Pedro Almodovar, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Miguel Littin, Etc., focusing on the cinematic discourse as well as the cultural and historic background of each film. The course will also provide advanced language training with particular emphasis in refining oral and writing skills. (cross listed with Spanish)


EASTH 330A01:Cinema Nostalgia

An examination of how fragmented, past images are re-collected and refashioned in the post-80s Chinese language feature films and documentaries produced in mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, with what implications. What are the historical conjunctures from which such re-member-ing cinema arises; how does this type of cinema help to deepen our understanding of the relationship between image, nostalgia and cinema; what kind of politics of nostalgia can we evolve on the basis of this cinema? (Wang)



EASTH275B01: Romancing/Passing

An exploration of the political and cultural implications of different kinds of border-crossing (or "passing") in films from or about East Asia. In tracking passages across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, and culture, we will focus especially on the production and meaning of Romance, which may take a variety of forms and bear a number of meanings: fantasmatic or realistic representation; homosexual or heterosexual desire; utopic or dystopic vision. This course will be conducted in concert with the Romance Passing film series to be held in April, 2005. (Wang)



GERM275: Topics in German Cultural Studies: Politics and Utopia in European Film

This course focuses on political cinema in Europe from the 60s through today. Questions we will ask include: How did political filmmakers conceive of the political impact of their art? What strategies did they adopt? How did their films relate to political movements on the ground? What theory informed their films? We will watch films by Kluge, Farocki, Bitomski, Godard, Tanner, John Smith, Akerman and others. We will also read texts by Kluge, Godard, Debord, Marcuse, Adorno, Benjamin and others. (Pavsek)

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SWARTHMORE

Fall 2007

FMST 001. Introduction to Film and Media Studies

Provides groundwork for further study in the discipline. Introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of film, video, and television studies such as formal analysis of image and sound, aesthetics, historiography, genres, authorship, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and nation, economics, and reception and audience studies. Emphasis on developing writing, analytical, and research skills. Films by Hitchcock, Godard, Lang, Sembene, Scorsese, Trinh, Welles, and selected video art and television genres. Required weekly evening screenings.

FMST 010. War News Radio

FMST 080. What on Earth is World Cinema?

Is there such a thing as world cinema? What is the relationship between "world cinema" and national cinemas? What is "national" about national cinemas? This course introduces students to theoretical debates about the categorization and global circulation of films, film style, authorship, and audiences through case studies drawn from Iranian, Indian, East Asian, Latin American, and European cinemas.

ENGL 09P. FYS: Women and Popular Culture: Fiction, Film, and Television

This course looks at Hollywood's "chick flicks" and "women's films" and television soap operas, their sources in 19th- and 20th-century popular fiction and melodrama, and the cultural practices surrounding their promotion and reception. How do race, class, and sexual orientation intersect with gendered genre conventions, discourses of authorship and critical evaluation, and the paradoxes of popular cultural pleasures? Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, The Joy Luck Club, Bridget Jones's Diary. Weekly screenings.

FREN 022. Cinema francais et francophone: Cinema de la ville

The history of French cinema is closely enmeshed with the development of the city. Films use the city to create setting, mood, tone, and style but also to represent and re-imagine the changing urban spaces in which actions occur. We will examine a history of the French cinematic representations of the city in the culture of the modern urban. This course will focus on film aesthetics and close analysis of film texts.

GERM 054. German Cinema

This course is an introduction to German cinema from its inception in the 1890s until the present. It will include an examination of early exhibition forms, expressionist and avant-garde films from the classic German cinema of the Weimar era, fascist cinema, postwar rubble films, DEFA films from East Germany, New German Cinema from the 1970s, and post-1989 heritage films. This course will analyze a cross-match of popular and avant-garde films while discussing mass culture, education, propaganda, and entertainment as identity- and nation-building practices. Taught in English.

SOAN 121. Visual Ethnography

This seminar examines the use of film and video by sociologist and anthropologist to convey and communicate aspects of culture that are visible—from rituals, performance, and dance to disputes and violence. The course will look at the history of visual ethnography and explore the major issues within the field, including the relationship between ethnographers and filmmakers, and the appropriateness of the conventions of documentary film, paying special attention to the influences of politics, economics, and technical advances. The course will include readings on visual ethnography and documentary film techniques. The main goals of the seminar are for students to understand the links between anthropological and sociological theory and the production of ethnographic and documentary film and to have the production skills necessary for directing their own work.

Spring 2008

FMST 02. Video Production Workshop

Provides instruction in basic technical aspects of digital video production and background in formal properties of video- and filmmaking. Exercises are designed to ensure a sound technical foundation as well as to familiarize students with the aesthetic principles underlying a variety of film styles and traditions. Limited to 12 students. Students may be responsible for some production expenses.

ENGL 087. American Narrative Cinema

Considers film as narrative form, audiovisual medium, industrial product, and social practice, emphasizing the emergence and dominance of classical Hollywood as a national cinema, with some attention to independent narrative traditions such as "race movies." Genres such as the western, the melodrama, and film noir express aspirations and anxieties about race, gender, class and ethnicity in the United States. Auteurist, formalist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods will be explored.

ENGL 122/FMST 100. Film Studies Seminar

This seminar addresses current topics and theoretical and methodological debates in film studies. We will consider historiography and research methodology; classical and contemporary film theory; the status of national cinemas, auteurs, and genres under globalization; the "end of cinema" in the age of new media. The relationship between film studies and media studies, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies will be a primary concern.

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SWARTHMORE PREVIOUSLY OFFERED COURSES


FMST 001. Introduction to Film and Media Studies



Provides groundwork for further study in the discipline. Introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of film, video, and television studies such as formal analysis of image and sound, aesthetics, historiography, genres, authorship, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and nation, economics, and reception and audience studies. Emphasis on developing writing, analytical, and research skills.

FMST 083. Animation & Cinema

GERM 054. German Cinema

FMST001 Introduction to Film & Media Studies

Lang Performing Provides groundwork for further study in the discipline. Introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of film, video, and television studies such as formal analysis of image and sound, aesthetics, historiography, genres, authorship, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and nation, economics, and reception and audience studies. Emphasis on developing writing, analytical, and research skills. Films by Hitchcock, Godard, Lange, Sembene, Scorsese, Trinh, Welles, and selected video art and television genres. Required weekly evening screenings.(Dass)



PNS 024 Japanese Film and Animation

This course offers a historical and thematic introduction to Japanese cinema, one of the world's great film traditions. Our discussions will center on the historical context of Japanese film, including how films address issues of modernity, gender, and national identity. Through our readings, discussion, and writing, we will explore various approaches to film analysis, with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of formal and thematic issues. A separate unit will consider the postwar development of Japanese animation (anime) and its special characteristics. Screenings will include films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Imamura, Kitano, and Miyazaki.(Gardner)



FMST080 What On Earth Is World Cinema?

Is there such a thing as world cinema? What is the relationship between "world cinema" and "national cinemas"? What is "national" about national cinemas? This course introduces students to theoretical debates about the categorization and global circulation of films, film style, authorship, and audiences through case studies drawn from Iranian, Indian, East Asian, Latin American, and European cinemas. (Dass)



FMST 092 Film Theory and Culture



Covers major paradigms and debates in classical and contemporary film theory, historiography, and research methodology: realism, montage, auteur theory, genre, semiotics and psychoanalysis, apparatus and spectatorship theory, Marxism, feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, theories of the avant-garde, Third Cinema, and new media. Recommended for senior minors and special majors, and advanced students with a background in film studies. Authors include Bazin, Benjamin, de Lauretis, Deleuze, Eisenstein, Hansen, Kracauer, Manovich, and Wollen. Directors may include Akerman, Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Frampton, Godard, Griffith, Powell, Sembene, Vertov, Welles, and Wong.



FMST 081. Indian Cinema





ENGL 09H. FYS: Women and Popular Culture: Fiction, Film, and Television

This course looks at Hollywood women's films and television soap operas, their sources in 19th- and 20th-century popular fiction and melodrama, and the cultural practices surrounding their promotion and reception. How do race, class, and sexual orientation intersect with gendered genre conventions, discourses of authorship and critical evaluation, and the paradoxes of popular cultural pleasures? We'll look at such novels and films as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, The Joy Luck Club. This is a writing course for first-year students, limited enrollment. (White)



ENGL 091. Feminist Film and Media Studies

This course focuses on critical approaches to films and videos made by women in a range of historical periods, national production contexts, and styles: mainstream and independent, narrative, documentary, video art, and experimental. Readings will address questions of authorship and aesthetics, spectator ship and reception, image and gaze, race, sexual, and national identity, and current media politics. (White)



SOAN 040D. Techgnosis

It is often assumed that the triumph of technological rationality has condemned the spiritual imagination to the trash heap of history. This class follows a different line of thinking. We will explore the enchantment, magical dreams, and utopian impulses that permeate the history of technology, from the railways to the Internet. What mixture of desire and terror can be tracked within these emerging transformations of reverence and religiosity? (Axel)



SPAN 063. El cine de la democracia en España

This course will examine Spanish post-Franquist cinema of the last three decades of the 20th century as a cultural product. The representations of class, gender, race, sexuality, regional and national identity will be analyzed to question and revise the traditional notion of an hegemonic, centralist 'Spanish/Castilian' culture. The films of the transition period (1976-82), basically concerned with recuperating a historical past, denied or distorted during the dictatorship, release the radical transformation of contemporary Spanish cinema regarding questions of national identity, sexuality and gender relations. Special emphasis will be placed on films produced by women directors in the '90's (Guardiola)



FMST 082. Modern Times: Cinema and Modernity in a Comparative Perspective

This seminar explores the relationship between cinema and modernity by examining national/regional film cultures from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It seeks to elucidate what film studies can tell us about modernity and modernism, and how a focus on modernity and a comparative perspective might reframe film history and theory. (Dass)



FMST 002. Video Production Workshop

Students may be responsible for some production expenses. Provides instruction in basic technical aspects of digital video production and background in formal properties of video- and filmmaking. Exercises are designed to ensure a sound technical foundation as well as to familiarize students with the aesthetic principles underlying a variety of film styles and traditions.



FMST 082. Modern Times: Cinema and Modernity in a Comparative Perspective

This seminar explores the relationship between cinema and modernity by examining national/regional film cultures from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It seeks to elucidate what film studies can tell us about modernity and modernism, and how a focus on modernity and a comparative perspective might reframe film history and theory. (Dass)



FMST 002. Video Production Workshop

NOTE: Prerequisite: A prior Swarthmore film studies course and permission of instructor or coordinator. Limited to 12 students.
Students may be responsible for some production expenses. Provides instruction in basic technical aspects of digital video production and background in formal properties of video- and filmmaking. Exercises are designed to ensure a sound technical foundation as well as to familiarize students with the aesthetic principles underlying a variety of film styles and traditions.