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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 321

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. Officially declared FMS, SA, and DMS majors are given priority registration; followed by officially declared FMS, SA, and DMS minors. Studio arts supplies fee: $50. For enrollment questions, contact Juliet Carello at juliet.carello@rochester.edu

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

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 is on learning about linguistic practice. The course will appeal to those who are curious about the central role language plays in the art of persuasion presented as advertising. The course touches upon the structure of language only insofar as it is relevant for understanding advertising as a form of social action. The acquired linguistic tools will help us to understand how commercial messages achieve their effect, regardless of their origins: business, culture or grass roots movements.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 202

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. $50 Studio Fee. If the course fills and you would like to be added to the wait list, please contact Stephanie Ashenfelder at stephanie.ashenfelder@rochester.edu.

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

This course offers 1) a comprehensive “grass roots” study of anime as film form and cultural phenomenon; and 2) a more specific and guided investigation of the work of Hayao Miyazaki and the world view and visual sensibilities of his creation, Studio Ghibli. We begin by investigating where anime comes from: historical precedence, significant sources, defining influences and routes of cultural exchange. We then focus on Miyazaki’s work and the Ghibli corpus in order to examine the specifics of animated cinematic construction that distinguish his work (e.g., iconography, visual landscape, character design, narrative tropes, music); methods of adaptation, influence, and genre variation; reception and fan culture; and anime’s potential for providing unique perspectives on race, gender, landscape, identity, and Japan's historical and mythological past. NO AUDITS.

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This course explores Hollywood's current fascination with race and gender as social issues and spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of increasingly conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in contemporary US culture, we analyze popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, from thrillers to action films to comedies.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

Understanding social psychology of modern & contemporary Western/American family experience, & especially its means of abetting the concealment, repression, & suppression of people's emotional lives. Study of the films combines with the readings seek to develop critical understanding of the nuclear family & the conditions it may create for child-rape, racism, homophobia, murder & self-destructive behavior such as substance abuse, self- mutilation, & suicide. Sometimes the violence is arbitrary, sometimes inevitable, sometimes incomprehensible. Each case the course's attention is on the personal & collective machineries of repression, resulting rage in many individuals & frequent (now often familiar) violent results. Readings incl; Nancy Chodorow, Alice Miller, Kristin Kelly, & Stephanie Coontz. Films are taken from: A Price Above Rubies, A Thousand Acres, All My Sons, American Beauty, American History X, Bastard out of Carolina, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Dolores Claiborne, and others.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501

This course will focus on modern Polish literature and culture and look at cultural heritage that is often considered local, ‘minor’ and inaccessible from the outside. We will explore Polish cinema (Wojciech Jerzy Has, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, etc.) and literature (Conrad, Schulz, Nałkowska, Borowski, Iwaszkiewicz, Miłosz, Gombrowicz, Szymborska, Zagajewski, Tokarczuk, Lem, Kapuściński, etc.), identifying local perspectives as well as global ambitions of Polish authors and artists, looking not only for national dimensions of Polish culture, but checking how it fits into the global cultural marketplace and world literature.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 218

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 television; and the horizons of experience that television opens up as the most important mass medium of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of our class will be devoted to closely analyzing and collectively discussing the television we watch, with the emphasis falling on narrative and fictional television in the network, cable, and streaming eras. Through the assignments in the course, students will also come to understand poetics as a useful approach to the study of any medium, an approach that now involves digital tools and technologies in powerful ways.

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This course will explore various concepts of mobility and encounters within ethnographic films and texts. Questions we will investigate include: How does one represent a culture? What notions of race, gender, sexuality and national identities are reinforced and challenged in these works? Who speaks for whom and what are the consequences? What kinds of power relationships are hidden or made visible in these films and texts?

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 205

This course examines major critical issues surrounding the horror genre, through close study of Classical Hollywood, post-classical, and international horror films, and readings in critical theory. Issues to be explored include boundary transgression and bodily abjection in the construction of the horror monster; gender, pregnancy, and the monstrous-feminine; social Otherness (race, class, sexuality) as monstrosity; the figure of the serial killer and the shift from classic to modern horror; the grotesque and the blending of comedy and horror in the zombie film. As a research seminar, the course will involve the development of a substantial research project.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403

Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of Italy’s major twentieth-century artists and intellectuals. He worked as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, playwright, essayist and painter, and created scandal with his radical critique of Italy’s modernization and rising consumer culture in the 1960s. As a director, he made some of the most challenging and controversial films in cinema history. This course gives students a solid understanding of his major films by examining how each work addresses Italy’s transformation from a premodern, agrarian and artisanal culture, to a modern, capitalist one. Films include: Accattone, Mamma Roma, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Theorem, The Decameron and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. To provide students with a foundation in Pasolini’s thinking and in film analysis, discussions will focus on both thematic and formal issues, such as Marxist politics, Catholicism, homoeroticism, sexuality, violence and his pastiche style. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles.

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 315

Intro to history, technology, cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention to major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, including a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of the George Eastman House. Same as FMS 247

BUILDING: GEM | ROOM: CURT

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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

This class explores global trends in film history from 1989 to the present. In considering the contemporary period of cinema, we will look at the technical, social, and formal aspects of the medium. Of particular interest will be new digital technologies for production, post-production, and exhibition in both commercial and independent filmmaking (e.g., CGI, HD, Motion Capture, High Frame Rate), all of which are linked to a network culture that emerges after 1989. We will also focus on geopolitical developments and social upheavals such as the end of the Cold War, the events of September 11, 2001, economic and cultural globalization, and the post-2008 financial crisis as all of these altered various national/regional cinemas and genres (e.g., the spy film, the horror movie, the comedy-drama, and action movies). We will screen the works of major figures in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century world cinema from the United States, China, and Hong Kong to Palestine, Iran, India, and Senegal.

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This course explores the possibilities of art-making through networked environments emphasizing emerging technologies and social practice. Our framing creative-research question for the semester will be: What does it mean to be an ecological being in the context of convergent ecological, digital, local, industrial, and global environments, and how do we make art that interrupts this experience? How can artists create texts, objects, and collaborative, participatory social actions that reinvigorate awareness of the ecologically and technologically interconnected world in which we live? We will find out! Not open to seniors. $50 Studio Fee. Permission of instructor is required to enroll.

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

The Weimar Republic (1919-33) was a period of great economic and political instability for Germany, as well as immense creativity and experimentation. Some of the most enduring and influential films of Western cinema such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Metropolis" were created in this environment. At the same time, there was great debate about this emerging medium and its status as art as well as its potential to further social and political change, questions that continue to be explored in film theory and film studies more generally. This course will look at the paths taken, experiments that were ultimately deemed successful as well as those that were less so but nevertheless compelling, in this search to realize film’s artistic and social potential. All readings and films will be in English.

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This course studies American writers’ engagement with shifting experiences of environment, nature, and place during the period of intense modernization from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading slave narratives, nature writing, novels, and essays, we will study how writers imagine human-environment relationships amidst social, economic, and technological changes, such as urbanization, colonization, industrialization, and the civil rights and social justice movements. A guiding question raised by the artworks is, How to create a meaningful connection to the planet in a time of so much injustice, destabilization, delocalization, mobility, and flux? Close attention will be paid to how literature can help us elucidate historical erasures of environmental relationships in modern times, such as experiences of racial oppression, eco-tourism, exoticism, trauma and war, exile, alienation, among others.

BUILDING: RRLIB | ROOM: 210

This course explores both historical antecedents and contemporary visions. It includes films by directors such as Spanish exile Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Reygadas, Raul Ruiz, Maria Novaro, and other box office favorites. From Robert Rodriguez's Bedhead, to Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and, of course, Y tu mama tambien, Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda, and La ley de Herodes we explore images of Mexican culture. Course taught in English but work may be written in Spanish for Spanish credit.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 121

The dialogue among Africans, African-Americans, and other peoples of African descent rest on their common experiences of oppression, liberation, and cultural exchanges, experiences that have turned the Atlantic from a line of division into a dynamic bridge. This course seeks to critically investigate the shared destinies of African peoples and peoples of the African descent throughout the world. Thus, while acknowledging the centrality of the African-American experience within the Black Diaspora, this course argues that this centrality requires a critical investigation of the representation of Black America in the cultural productions of Africans, Haitians, Caribbeans and Black Europe. The Reading list include Maryse Condé, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Ngugi was Thiongo.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 441

Taking the inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s anthological film My Voyage to Italy, the course focuses on a few momentous episodes and phenomena of Italian political, social, and cultural history as portrayed and interpreted in film. We will discuss aspects of Risorgimento, Fascism, the World Wars and their aftermath, the culture of individual cities, the contrast between North and South, the condition of women, emigration and immigration, power and repression, spirituality, and secularism. Among the major film directors, we will include Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, Olmi, and Bertolucci. The analysis of the movies will be integrated with readings from the fields of history, literature, criticism, and theater. A glance at Verdi’s operas in the Nineteenth Century and at the tradition of social song as it develops in the post war period will complement the course. This course is complementary to HIS 228 offered in Arezzo.

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This course will explore major developments in the East German cinema, including issues such as coming to terms with the fascist past, popular filmmaking and art cinema, cinema as a pedagogical tool, artistic dissent and state censorship, socialist ideologies of gender, and the politics of documentary. Each film will be explored in relation to its socio-historical context, providing students with an overview of East German film and culture.

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A focused study of Godzilla on film, beginning with the 1954 film that inspired and helped define the Japanese kaiju eiga genre. The larger context of the course is a critical investigation of genre film, specifically the science-fiction/horror/creature-feature film, and a careful consideration of the “culture of war” (World War II through 21st century). We begin with a sampling of seminal non-Japanese titles that provided the foundation for the Godzilla film paradigm, then focus on a close textual study of select “Godzilla films” that help us understand the historical and social contexts for Godzilla’s erratic trajectory since 1954. Recent DVD releases with both dubbed and original Japanese language versions enable us to dissect the culturally generated permutations of kaiju eiga.

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This course offers 1) a comprehensive “grass roots” study of anime as film form and cultural phenomenon; and 2) a more specific and guided investigation of the work of Hayao Miyazaki and the world view and visual sensibilities of his creation, Studio Ghibli. We begin by investigating where anime comes from: historical precedence, significant sources, defining influences and routes of cultural exchange. We then focus on Miyazaki’s work and the Ghibli corpus in order to examine the specifics of animated cinematic construction that distinguish his work (e.g., iconography, visual landscape, character design, narrative tropes, music); methods of adaptation, influence, and genre variation; reception and fan culture; and anime’s potential for providing unique perspectives on race, gender, landscape, identity, and Japan's historical and mythological past. NO AUDITS.

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This course explores Hollywood's current fascination with race and gender as social issues and spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of increasingly conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in contemporary US culture, we analyze popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, from thrillers to action films to comedies.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

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A focused study of Godzilla on film, beginning with the 1954 film that inspired and helped define the Japanese kaiju eiga genre. The larger context of the course is a critical investigation of genre film, specifically the science-fiction/horror/creature-feature film, and a careful consideration of the “culture of war” (World War II through 21st century). We begin with a sampling of seminal non-Japanese titles that provided the foundation for the Godzilla film paradigm, then focus on a close textual study of select “Godzilla films” that help us understand the historical and social contexts for Godzilla’s erratic trajectory since 1954. Recent DVD releases with both dubbed and original Japanese language versions enable us to dissect the culturally generated permutations of kaiju eiga.

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