Course Catalog

The course will help you learn to direct and produce complex, personally expressive short fictions films. We’ll do this through incremental exercises designed to help you explore storytelling structures, staging, expressive frames, working with actors, sound design, crew negotiation and editing. We’ll also learn essentials of producing, press and distribution. Conducted from the director/producer viewpoint, the course challenges students to create a film that matches form with content and develops production skills through all stages of the process. The class is also an immersive creative workshop, incubating everyone’s ideas with support from the group. Some students will direct their own films. Others will produce other students’ short films in lieu of directing their own film. For best results, it is advised that you have already taken Principles of Video Production and at least one Film Studies course.

This course considers how the language of film can sometimes unlock the secrets of Shakespeare's world and help us to understand his contribution to the evolution of art cinema as well as to blockbuster culture. Focus is given to close readings of Shakespeare's plays, analysis of cinematic adaptations and a study of films such as Al Pacino's Looking for Richard or Shakespeare in Love. Directors Kozintsev, Welles, Godard, Olivier and Kurosawa are also studied.

In this course, students will have the opportunity to make their own documentary shorts and to begin work on longer form projects. They will also be introduced to some basic documentary genres and approaches such as social issues,
journalistic, dramatic, personal, poetic, biographical, experimental. They will learn how to research, script, shoot, and edit their work, also how to interview and improvise.

Traumatic reaction in the aftermath of WWI, the rapid evolution of cinema and photography, emerging trends of psychoanalytic thought, all contributed to a disturbing, often volatile, re-examination of the aesthetics of literature in the wake of a culture of ruin characterizing early 20th century Europe. Trends in mass consumption, such as the popularity of crime fiction and its existential outgrowth film noir, are largely rooted in this struggle to come to terms with cultural transitions taking place between the two wars. This course will examine the origins and aesthetics of crime fiction and film, notably, the evolution of film noir and the série noire, and other developments in Europe and America just before and after WWII. Students will analyze some of the canonical writers whose works influenced a second generation of crime fiction writers as well as the works of film directors who presided over these crucial moments of transition.

Focuses on two major periods of production: Weimar and the New German Cinema. Features the work of Lang, Murnau, Wiene, Pabst, and Lubitsch, and studies their important contribution to film form. Attention given to 'emigre' directors in Hollywood, and then moves onto works by Fassbinder, Kluge, Wenders, Schloendorff, Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta, and Doris Dorrie.

Studies post-1945 Japanese cinema, including the Kurosawa epics (Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ran, Dream). Other masters include Ozu, Mizoguchi and Oshima. Examines Indian cinema and Satyajit Ray, and his masterful Apu trilogy. Concentrates on new Asian film, with works by Chinese (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-Wai, Tsai Ming Liang, and Ang Lee.

Studies post-1945 Japanese cinema, including the Kurosawa epics (Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ran, Dream). Other masters include Ozu, Mizoguchi and Oshima. Examines Indian cinema and Satyajit Ray, and his masterful Apu trilogy. Concentrates on new Asian film, with works by Chinese (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-Wai, Tsai Ming Liang, and Ang Lee.

Focuses on periods when Italian cinema was at the cutting edge of World Cinema. Begins with films such as Fellini's autobiographical Amarcord. Studies silent-era spectacles (Quo Vadis, Cabiria), and Italian film under fascism and its renaissance with Rossellini and De Sica. Examines leading filmmakers including Fellini, Pasolini, Visconti, and Antonioni. Explores Italian comedy, and the links between cinema and society.

How does cinema in the Arab world and Africa raise important questions about culture, politics and meaning? In this course, we'll explore major developments in the art and industry of cinema in the Arab World and Africa, ranging from the earliest cinema to the most recent contemporary films. We will explore emerging national cinemas and the interactions of Arab and African filmmakers with cinematic movements arising around the world. In exploring the work of a range of important filmmakers, we will think critically about ways in which filmic narratives and forms contribute to the understanding of the cultures and history and advance the art form.

Offers an overview of the 'Iberian and Latin American New Wave': a group of national cinemas exploring contemporary societies of Latin America and the Iberian peninsula. Assesses how films problematize political and cultural issues such as dictatorial pasts, post-modern capitalist democracy, negotiating gender, sexual and racial identities in phallocentric post-colonial societies. The course is structured around screenings and class lectures/seminars.