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 students to current software for creating, editing, and producing core Digital Media objects: photographs, video, vector images, 3D models, & videogames. This fast paced project driven course invites experts in the fields of photography, video, graphic design, rapid prototyping and gaming to share their knowledge and experience. Through finding creative solutions to problems posed by instructors, you will manipulate photographs, edit a short video, design graphics, make and modify a 3D model, and create a small interactive videogame environment. The course culminates with designing a digital portfolio of the work you create.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 208

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. Declared FMS and Studio Art (SA) major are given priority registration, followed by FMS and SA minors. For questions on registration for this course, contact Carlie Fishgold at c.fishgold@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: CSB | ROOM: 209

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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

In the 1970's the matter of whether gendered discourse exists, and if so what it is, was posed by several researchers. Each of these researchers described how language uses are political, and they insisted that the discussions of gender and language acknowledge the political values that affect the uses of language. Although there is no established "theory" of language and gender, several sources in modern and contemporary literature and popular culture have portrayed situations in which it is possible to relate language uses to political manifestations of gender. A most effective recent text in this regard is the current Showtime series, "Masters of Sex." The reading list has three kinds of texts: (1) The early language studies by Lakoff, Spender, and Tannen; the discussion of the Thomas hearing by Lakoff and by Morrison; the language of law, using essays by Susan Estrich and Patricia Williams; (2) novels that highlight the political valences of language use; and (3) contemporary TV series and films.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501

This course examines major historical movements and styles in the documentary film tradition, and explores the migration of documentary across a range of (multi-)media platforms. We will study the expository documentary, ethnographic film, the direct cinema and cinéma vérité movements, documentary’s intersections with avant-garde film, mock documentary and hoax films, personal and autobiographical film and video, animated documentary, and digital interactive documentary media. We will engage with these film and media forms through a variety of approaches: critical and theoretical readings and class discussion, written responses and longer analytical and research-based papers, and hands-on media work including video essays and found-footage editing projects. No previous experience with nonlinear editing systems such as Final Cut Pro is required, but students must be willing to critically and creatively explore nonfiction media as both scholars and makers.

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In this class, we will explore the politics of television from three primary directions. First, we will look at traditional political programming such as news reporting, debates, morning shows, and late night satire alongside series such as The West Wing, Homeland, Occupied, and Law and Order. Second, we will explore the cultural politics of television, considering how it tackles issues of race, sexuality, and gender directly and indirectly across different genres of television. Finally, we will consider the relationship of television to political economy, asking how television functions as a culture industry; how it makes visible (or not) the relationship between the political and the economic in the stories it tells; and how it narrates class and capitalism in non-fiction and fiction television alike. Priority to junior and senior English majors, and to FMS majors. Email the instructor to inquire about enrollment.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403

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: GEH | ROOM:

This course will explore developments in world cinema—industrial, social, and political—from 1959 to 1989. It will explore film aesthetics, technologies, and circulation questions, considering questions like the following: What’s new about the French New Wave? What do we mean by Third Cinema? How do different national cinemas influence each other? In what ways have various national cinemas responded critically to Hollywood’s commercial dominance and to its conventions? How do popular and “art” cinemas speak to each other. How does cinema respond to the pressures and provocations of other media at the inception of the digital age? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

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

This course will ​study the ​end of the world in literature, film, new media, and critical/cultural theory, emphasizing ​the new geological epoch ​of the Anthropocene. Topics to be studied a range of dissolutions of nature/culture distinctions in the Anthropocene ​and the anxiety and promises therein. We will investigate how artists, theorists, and writers represent mass extinction, fertility crises, ​superstorms, climate change, genetic engineering, post-humanism, ​and ​environmental apocalypse. Fiction to be studied includes Cormac McCarthy's ​The Road, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ian McEwan’s Solar, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide. Films include Mad Max: Fury Road, Snowpiercer, Children of Men, Wall.E, Day After Tomorrow, ​and Beasts of the Southern Wild​.

BUILDING: RRLIB | ROOM: 209

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.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 312

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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

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.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 413

This course presents an overview of cinema in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1930s to the present, considering how cinema has served a means of representing and reshaping Chinese historical identities and everyday life at home and abroad. We will approach film as a mixed medium of narrative, image, and sound, and focus on how it represents the spectacle of modern China by mediating among recurring issues of modern (especially urban) life, the persistence of the past, the relations of place to Chinese and global culture, and the staging of these questions through issues of gender and ethnicity. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the interaction of themes, narrative genres (such as melodrama), formal techniques, and cultural and social context.

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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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As the most famous artist of the second half of the twenthieth century, Warhol has been the subject of a growing literature that expands upon art history and criticism to encompass queer theory and cultural studies. But the most important shift in Warhols reception has been brought about by the restoration and return to circulation of his prolific film output from the years 1963-69. The films will be the main focus of this course, but we will also consider Warhols early work as a fashion illustrator, his entrepreneurship at the Factory, his voracious collecting, and, of course, his paintings. We will read Warhols writings, including A a Novel. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Popism; and we will examine new approaches to Warhol and ask how they illuminate not only the art but also such issues as consumption, publicity, visibility, celebrity, sexuality, identity, and selfhood.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course examines the philosophical, aesthetic, and social issues that are central to classical film theory. It traces the historical development of film theory from 1900 to the 1950s. We will begin with on thinkers in the period of early cinema, including Germaine Dulac, Jean and Marie Epstein, and then we will examine the development of film theory in the work of later theorists, such as Jean Mitry, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin and Christian Metz. Weekly screenings of historically contemporary films will allow us to examine the ongoing dialogue between the evolving medium and the developing theoretical discussion.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

PREREQUISITES: FMS 132 - Intro to Art of Film OR FMS 131 - Intro to Media Studies

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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.

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.

BUILDING: | ROOM:

As the most famous artist of the second half of the twenthieth century, Warhol has been the subject of a growing literature that expands upon art history and criticism to encompass queer theory and cultural studies. But the most important shift in Warhols reception has been brought about by the restoration and return to circulation of his prolific film output from the years 1963-69. The films will be the main focus of this course, but we will also consider Warhols early work as a fashion illustrator, his entrepreneurship at the Factory, his voracious collecting, and, of course, his paintings. We will read Warhols writings, including A a Novel. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Popism; and we will examine new approaches to Warhol and ask how they illuminate not only the art but also such issues as consumption, publicity, visibility, celebrity, sexuality, identity, and selfhood.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course examines the philosophical, aesthetic, and social issues that are central to classical film theory. It traces the historical development of film theory from 1900 to the 1950s. We will begin with on thinkers in the period of early cinema, including Germaine Dulac, Jean and Marie Epstein, and then we will examine the development of film theory in the work of later theorists, such as Jean Mitry, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin and Christian Metz. Weekly screenings of historically contemporary films will allow us to examine the ongoing dialogue between the evolving medium and the developing theoretical discussion.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

PREREQUISITES: FMS 132 - Intro to Art of Film OR FMS 131 - Intro to Media Studies