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.

Location

Morey Room 321 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Humans and machines, infrastructure and architecture, community, and culture: how do these relationships shape our imagination of sounds and music? Through practice-based research, we will explore the aural environments generated by the industrial and post-industrial history of cities along the Rust Belt, studying, for example, how Industrial Fordism’s merger of human and machine informed the rise of sample culture and machine-based rhythm and music. Using Detroit as our case study, we will examine how African-American arts, culture, and history, combined with the rise of the automobile industry, produced Detroit Techno as way for artists to respond to the sonic architecture of their environment. Meanwhile, we will be making our own field recordings of our local urban environments and electronically processing them into tones and beats, and then sequencing and mixing our research into sonic productions using non-screen-based hardware devices. Not open to seniors.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

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. Sophomores and Juniors with officially declared FMS and SA majors are given priority registration; followed by sophomores and juniors with officially declared FMS and SA minors. Studio arts supplies fee: $50. To be added to the rolling waiting list, please contact Jason Middleton at jason.middleton@rochester.edu.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (TR 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

For as long as there have been movies, filmmakers have used the medium of film to explore concerns central to the study of religion: how does (or doesn’t) God act in the world? What worlds do “religious” institutions engender and what room do these worlds afford for individual will and desire? Within and outside these structures, how is one to be good? Special attention will be paid to questions of representing metaphysics, of ethics, and of power and agency, particularly vis-à-vis gender and sexuality.

Location

Hylan Building Room 201 (M 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

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.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

In the decade preceding the collapse of the USSR, rock music became a galvanizing force for change and an enduring cultural commodity for the last Soviet generation.  The traditionally western musical genre, often maligned by the establishment for its alleged propaganda of anti-socialist ideology, quickly infiltrated everyday like in the USSR and, subsequently, other art forms; most notably, the high regimented Soviet film industry.  This course will examine the representation of rock music in Soviet, post-Soviet and contemporary Russian cinema and will raise questions about the ways in which film popular music engages with sociopolitical events and acts as a destabilizing agent for totalitarianism. Taught in English.

Location

Goergen Hall Room 110 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

For many, the mental image of American artistic production from the Depression Era is far more akin to the barren black & white Kansas homestead than the sparkling technicolor of Oz. This was hardly the case. In fact, the 1930s was a decade of diverse artistic experiments in the United States—a veritable laboratory for debating art’s forms and social aims that would come to redefine American culture itself. This course introduces a range of those experiments, focusing on the network between film and the other visual arts. Topics include federally sponsored New Deal programs, the social realisms of African-American and immigrant artists, the rise of photo-journalism and emergence of “documentary” across mediums, the aesthetic diplomacy of World’s Fairs and films such as Capra’s American Madness, Lang’s Fury, and Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the course we will be asking in what ways did these experiments represent propositions about the direction and shape of modern art and culture in America.

Location

Hylan Building Room 201 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

From rom coms, musical comedies, and sitcoms to tragicomedy, satire, and slapstick, many versions of comedy have made us laugh out loud or smile sardonically throughout human history from the ancients to the moderns. While this history will have a place in our course, we will primarily investigate comedy in film and television of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore critical issues related to comedy, including the function and meaning of laughter and jokes; moments of comic relief; the relationship of comedy to community and crisis; love, sexuality, and romance; the role of the body and whether comedy is a "body genre"; how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class get messily mediated by comedy; the difference of comedy from other modes such as tragedy, horror, and realism; and the varying tones comedy can have from dark to light, serious to fun, and comforting to disturbing.

Location

Morey Room 501 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course will look at how artists and intellectuals from across the African continent have used the internet to shape culture, society, and art forms in the 21st century. We’ll study a wide range of material, from viral blogs, pop culture e-zines, and hypertext fiction, to music, video art, and digital exhibits in fashion and cultural heritage. We’ll also study the ways young people have used social media in recent years to galvanize movements for social change, like #EndSars in Nigeria and #RhodesMustFall in South Africa. How do Teju Cole’s tweeted short stories, or the Nest Collective’s crime thriller Facebook videos, engage global audiences? How do these and other works shape conversations on topics as disparate as migration, police brutality, Afrofuturism, style, and the space of LGBTQ life? Together we’ll examine how African artists and thinkers have taken to the internet to critically engage our contemporary world, cultivate new aesthetic forms, and create new forms of community and belonging.

Location

Morey Room 501 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

A good science fiction story," Frederik Pohl proposes, "should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam." This course considers the "traffic jams"—the far-flung possible worlds imagined in Japanese science fiction—from the 1920s to the present. Genres covered include the short story, short short story, novel, manga, anime, and film. Japanese science fiction is considered in planetary perspective: Japanese works are considered alongside pertinent works from other national traditions of science fiction. This course is interested ultimately in explorations of a futuristic approach to the study of literature: it is interested in what our readings today might tell us about what tomorrow might bring. All readings are done in English translation; all viewing have English subtitling. 

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (WF 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course focuses on the horror genre as popular entertainment in Germany, England, and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Particular attention will be paid to the construction of 'others' as monsters in literature and film (Frankenstein, Vampires, Devils, Aliens, etc.). Authors/filmmakers include: Hoffmann, Poe, Shelley, Stoker, Jackson, Rice, Harris, King, Murnau, Jordan, Wise, Siegel, Kubrick, Demme, . This course is part of the Horror in Literature & Film Cluster.

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

How do cyborgs, superheroes, and ghosts change our understanding of what it means to be human? How do interstellar travel, dystopian climate change, and revisionist ancient histories reframe the way we think of African diasporic histories of trauma, survival, desired freedom, and collective belonging? Studying science fiction, fantasy, and horror from across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, this course will focus on how 20th and 21st century artists have reimagined black life after slavery and empire. We’ll study a range of artistic forms, including fiction, film, visual art, and music, by artists like Octavia Butler, Wanuri Kahiu, Nalo Hopkinson, Jordan Peele, and Wangechi Mutu. We’ll look at how artists of color contort the world we know, and how they use the speculative mode to pose deeply philosophical and historical questions.

Location

Hylan Building Room 203 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course contests its title. There is language and literature/film that records how language has failed as a means of (human) species adaptation toward conflict resolution in domestic and international contexts. This course, following the observations of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1939), tries to document the language/literary connections between domestic violence and war making. In domestic situations, violence is protected by traditions of privacy and male governance of households; in public situations, there has been an inertia throughout recorded history in enacting the ideal announced in Isaiah: '[nations] shall not learn war any more'. In our own society genres of popular and elite culture teach the necessity and glory of war through literature, film, toys, sports, and ideals of heroic behavior. Our normal ways of speaking still presuppose violence and war as a 'last resort' in solving domestic and international antagonisms.

Location

Morey Room 504 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The city in film and literature is never just a physical space - discourses of modernity and urban life are mapped onto real and imagines urban spaces. In this course we will explore how the relationship between the spaces of the city and the stories told about and through them shape our understanding of urban life. Some of the texts we will examine are: Fritz Langs M, Arthur Schnitzlers Dream Story, and Lloyd Bacons 42nd Street.

Location

Hylan Building Room 306 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. 

Location

Hylan Building Room 202 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

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. FMS 132, “Introduction to the Art of Film,” typically a prerequisite.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

"It’s not climate change—it’s everything change," novelist Margaret Atwood has said. This course uses video and moving image to examine the deep intertwined and intersectional roots of the ecological crisis, from viral pandemics and racial justice to the disruption of our climate and all the other apocalyptic scenarios we currently find ourselves in. To guide our development of ecocinematic consciousness, we will study French philosopher Félix Guattari's foundational text, The Three Ecologies, to understand how ecologies of mind, media, and environment are interrelated and to complicate our understandings of "nature." Student Projects will involve installation, single channel sound, and networked-based approaches. Works will be examined within a critical environmental arts framework through readings, critiques, viewings and discussions. Permission of instructor. $50 studio fee.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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.

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (WF 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Location

Meliora Room 209 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course examines American writers’ responses to intense social, economic, and technological upheavals, such as urbanization, colonization, industrialization, and social injustices, from 1850s through now. Topics to be covered include colonialism, eco-tourism, slavery, civil rights, trauma, technology, urbanization, and the rise of science, and students can expect to explore the questions such as the following: How do environmental issues relate to the politics of race? How do writers represent the ongoing trauma of losing indigenous land? How to communicate the invisible hazards of climate change and the chemical industry? How has the rise of rationality displaced spiritual visions of the natural world? How do we create a meaningful connection to home and the planet amidst so much injustice and technological upheaval? INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. NOT OPEN TO SENIORS.

Location

Morey Room 524 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course studies the cultural, economic, and ecological flows of the industrial food system–from its origins in the slave economies of sugar plantations in the colonial era to current-day monocultures of corn, soy, and palm oil spanning the globe. Using the lens of the Plantation, we will connect contemporary social and environmental problems like climate change, racial injustice, and global inequality to the colonization of people, animals, plants, and the planet, to the turning of biodiverse cultures and ecosystems into cash-crop factories, animals into raw materials, and people into displaced workers. In the process, we will cover many well-known but little-understood topics, including biotech, chemical inputs, fast/processed food, and GMOs, as well as critical theories that illuminate the cultural frameworks that shape perceptions of food, including modernization, decolonization, animal rights, and neoliberalism. Films include Okja and Solvent Green. Readings include Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, Leah Penniman's Farming While Black, Timothy Pachirat's Every Twelve Seconds, and Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe. Includes visit to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen. 

Not Open to Seniors.

Contact Leila Nadir for permission leila.nadir@rochester.edu

Location

Meliora Room 224 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

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. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 209 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course will explore the many ways in which cinema operates as a time machine.  Through close analysis of works by Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard we will consider varieties of cinematic temporality in relation to questions of history and memory (collective and subjective).  Requirement of two previous film courses. Readings will include: Gilles Deleuze, Kaja Silverman, David Rodowick, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin.

Location

Morey Room 205 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

This course studies the cinema of actor, screenwriter and director Juzo Itami, whose independent features (1984-1997) made him a globally recognized auteur and opened doors for Japan’s current generation of independent filmmakers. An established cultural figure when he started directing, Itami drew on personal experience to focus on timely social issues that were literally matters of Life (food, sex, table etiquette in Tampopo, tax evasion, gangsters, cults, political corruption in Taxing Woman 1 and 2) and Death (funeral costs, absurd rituals in The Funeral, inane health care bureaucracy in Daibyonin). Itami’s signature style--quirky aesthetics, trenchant wit, self-conscious “movie moments,” and a penchant for an unconventional female lead--resonated in Japan and attracted worldwide audiences by shattering long-lived stereotypes. Through interdisciplinary readings and an interactive lecture/discussion format, we’ll focus equally on the elements of Itami’s cinematic style, how it was shaped by cultural, social, and industrial forces, and how his work depicts the underside of Japan’s dramatic trajectory from the flush “Bubble economy” to the recessionary 1990s. All films subtitled in English. No prerequisites, no audits

Location

Meliora Room 209 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

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. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 209 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)