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

Online Room 14 (ASE) (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

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.

Location

Rettner Hall Room 201 (MW 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

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.

Location

Online Room 12 (ASE) (MW 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

In this course, students will examine the portrayal of religion in American, European, and Israeli film, both contemporary and classic. The course will address issues such as immigration and assimilation, gender and the status of women, religious reform, responses to the Holocaust, with close attention to the significant impact and influence of American representations of Jewish life. Select readings will sharpen our analysis of film as well as situate the films within the historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced.

Location

Online Room 11 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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 in the course is on learning about the structure of language and how we can use it as a guide to observing and understanding the effectiveness of commercial messages.

Location

Lattimore Room 201 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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 Megan Mette at megan.mette@rochester.edu.

Location

Online Room 11 (ASE) (TR 9:40AM - 12:20PM)

How does one represent the unrepresentable? This is the key question we will explore as we look at films and literature about the Holocaust. We will examine how fictional films, novels, documentaries and memoirs challenge our conceptualizations of representation and documentation, often leading to experiments in both form and content. Of particular interest will be the relationship between affect, aesthetics and ethics in these negotiations of loss, horror and redemption.

Location

Online Room 4 (ASE) (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

We often think of technology as something that is separate from our bodies, without gender, race, sexual orientation, or (dis)ability. How do preconceived ideas and inherent biases about identity inform the development and use of technology? The field of media archaeology offers a means to understand gendered and racial biases inherited by new technology through studying new and old technologies—and their cultural representations in advertising and media—for successes, failures, and alternative possibilities that were never realized. In a culture that is constantly adopting new technologies and upgrading gadgets, where does the history of technology and the people who developed it go? Women were often the unsung and forgotten laborers who manufactured and operated new technologies. By digging through layers of technological history and challenging the usual narrative of technological progress, this course questions assumptions underlying how technology is built and operates. It examines the relationship of technology to society and our everyday, embodied lives through taking concrete examples of technology, like photography or artificial intelligence, as case studies. We will also consider cultural imagination about technology and its oppressive or emancipatory possibilities. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach in the chosen readings and incorporates films and popular media. Classes rely upon student participation and discussion. Students will acquire critical skills to better understand our technological present with implications for the methodology and practice of creating new media and developing future technologies that break with the biases of the past.

This class can count for a "media history, theory, and practice" requirement for the DMS major and minor. This course may also be taken to fulfill and upper level writing requirement in consultation with the professor.

Location

Morey Room 501 (W 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

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. Please contact Professor Middleton at jason.middleton@rochester.edu to request permission to add the course.  Priority registration for Film and Media Studies and English majors

Location

Online Room 12 (ASE) (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

In this course we’ll dive deep into the cultural history of three sprawling cities, asking how urban space on the African continent has been imagined and reimagined from the mid-20th century to the present. Spending consecutive weeks on each—Lagos (Nigeria), Nairobi (Kenya), Johannesburg (South Africa)—we will traverse an eclectic range of materials and perspectives. We’ll read about underground club cultures, colonial segregation laws, LGBTQ communities, and emergent musics like Afrobeat, Benga, and Township Tech. We’ll also study an array of cultural forms spanning sci-fi film, music videos, novels, sound art, fashion blogs, and comics. How, we’ll ask, do ever-shifting constraints, global influences, and desires for freedom change the shape of a city? What does it mean for a city to be continually reimagined and revised?

Location

Online Room 6 (ASE) (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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, 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, graphic novels, and music, by artists like Octavia Butler, Wanuri Kahiu, Wangechi Mutu, Nalo Hopkinson, Ryan Coogler, and Nnedi Okorafor. 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

Online Room 3 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course explores three of Italy’s mostprominent postwar directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. 
Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific formal and thematic innovations, such as Fellini’s 
carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal 
figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar 
Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the 
legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and 
Zabriskie Point; Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, 
biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will 
be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles

Location

Morey Room 525 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Taking place on farms and in the classroom, this incubator course combines documentary video-making and community engagement alongside the study of critical/cultural theory in order to investigate, emergent networks and practices of food justice in Rochester. Work will be undertaken in collaboration with Taproot Collective Farm, a nonprofit with the mission of designing and building holistic systems for healthy local food, dignified housing, and educational opportunities with Rochester communities. Previous coursework in Video Art, EHU or other relevant subjects is required. Please note the unique time schedule.  Permission of instructor. $50 studio fee.

Location

Online Room 7 (ASE) (M 2:00PM - 6:00PM)

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

Hylan Building Room 101 (WF 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The category of “guilt” floats between theology, psychology, and criminology. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a purported objective condition, guilt stars in big stories moderns tell about what it is to be a member of a society, what it is to be a religious person, and how it feels to be a creature with sexual appetites. Meanwhile, for legal and mental health professions, proof of guilt is used to sort the good from the bad, the normal from the deviant, and the socially respectable from the socially disposable. Not all is so dour, however. Guilt lives in confession, denunciation, and in criminal sentencing, but it is also the stuff of jokes, of ethnic pride, and of eroticism. Toward an anatomy of guilt, in this course we will draw on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Janet Malcolm and Sarah Schulman, and we will wrestle with the films—and complicated legacies—of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, two filmmakers who are preoccupied with (and implicated by) guilt, as feeling and as fact.

Location

Online Room 6 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Location

Online Room 5 (ASE) (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

Online Room 5 (ASE) (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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.

Location

Online Room 6 (ASE) (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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

Online Room 11 (ASE) (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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

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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. No prerequisites. All films subtitled in English.

Location

Online Room 5 (ASE) (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.

Location

Online Room 11 (ASE) (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)