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. $75 Studio Fee.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 103 (MW 10:25AM - 1:05PM)

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.

Location

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

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

Hylan Building Room 306 (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. $75 Studio Fee. If the course fills and you would like to be added to the wait list, please go to https://www.sageart.center/resources.

Location

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

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 Miyazakis 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 animes potential for providing unique perspectives on race, gender, landscape, identity, and Japan's historical and mythological past. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (M 3:25PM - 6:05PM)

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 306 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

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, Nairobi, and Johannesburg—we will traverse an eclectic range of materials and perspectives. We’ll read about underground club cultures, pentecostalism, student protest movements, LGBTQ communities, and emergent musics like Afrobeat, Benga, and Township Tech. We’ll also study an array of cultural forms spanning music videos, novels, sci-fi film, fashion blogs, and¬¬¬ memoir. How 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

Meliora Room 218 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

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 401 (F 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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)

Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made some of the most challenging and controversial films in the history of cinema. He created scandal with his radical critique of Italy’s modernization and rising consumer culture in the 1960s. 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 civilization, to a modern, capitalist one. Films include: Accattone, Mamma Roma, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Theorem, The Decameron and Salò. To provide students with foundations in Pasolini’s thought and film analysis, discussions will focus on both thematic and formal issues, such as Marxism, the sacred, sexuality, violence and pastiche. 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

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

In this course, we will explore both the role of television in politics and the various modes through which television represents political life, focusing primarily on the United States. Developing a conceptual toolkit to analyze the politics of television, we will explore how the audiovisual form of television matters politically by posing the following questions: How do broadcast and cable news shape political discourse? What alternatives—e.g., community, activist, public, and documentary television—have developed to exploit and/or challenge the dominance of broadcast and cable networks in the representation of political life? What is the role of storytelling in the politics of television, from fictional series such as The West Wing, Homeland, News of a Kidnapping, and Parks and Recreation to the use of narrative in Congressional and Senate hearings about, for example, major public events and nominations to the Supreme Court? 

Location

Lechase Room 163 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores the remarkably elastic—and durable—genre of the road movie.  Across a range of periods in film history, and through a framework of transnational exchange and circulation, we will examine the ways this adaptable genre focuses questions of national and regional identity, racial, ethnic, gender class differences.  We will pay special attention to the road movie’s existential and phenomenological preoccupations.

Location

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

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. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting.

Location

Hylan Building Room 102 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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,” is typically a prerequisite.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores the possibilities of art-making through digital, 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/Permission of Instructor. $75 Studio Fee.

Location

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

Since the turn of this century, there’s been an outpouring of film and television adaptations written and directed by black artists. Among the most recent is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2022 Hulu miniseries of Octavia Butler’s 1979 speculative fiction novel Kindred. As well as Barry Jenkins’s Academy Award-winning film Moonlight (2016), adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semiautobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. And outside the US there’s plenty more, like Wanuri Kahiu’s groundbreaking Rafiki (2018), which the filmmaker based on Monica Arac de Nyeko’s short story “Jambula Tree,” shifting the setting from Uganda to Kenya. In this course we’ll move through a series of pairings, studying the adapted film or series alongside the work that inspired it. What gets lost, what remains, and what’s created anew when a work of literature moves to the screen? We’ll study fiction, film, and television from around the world, looking at how black artists from North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean reimagine the work of others. Our readings and screenings will lead us to an array of topics, such as slavery, transnational migration, colorism, time travel, and perhaps most persistently, the space of black queer desire and belonging.

Location

Lechase Room 143 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Location

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

In this course we will slowly, closely, intensely, and meditatively study novels by Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Linda Hogan, and Leslie Marmon Silko. And we will also learn how to narrate and write our own environmental stories. 

INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. NOT OPEN TO SENIORS.

Location

Dewey Room 4162 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Go Local, Go Organic, Farm to Table. What do these trendy slogans really mean? This course takes a humanities approach to contemporary eating practices and consumer trends by tracing how industrial, political, and ecological processes, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, construct how food appears on our plates–as well as how our understandings of food are constructed and channeled through neoliberal and biopolitical discourses. In order to understand the politics, economics, and history of contemporary food industry and culture, we will cover well-known but little-understood topics, such as biotech, chemical inputs, fast/processed food, GMOs, superbugs, as well as critical theories that illuminate the cultural frameworks that shape our perception, including modernity/modernization, neoliberal economics, narrative theory, post-humanism, microbiological science, celebrity and media culture, and critical race and class studies. Outside-the-classroom elements of this class include a fermentation workshop, a Rochester Food Tour, a behind-the-scenes UofR Dining Services Tour, and a trip to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen.

Not Open to Seniors

Location

Lechase Room 160 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

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

Film Capstone

Location

Rettner Hall Room 201 (W 10:25AM - 1:05PM)

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

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 Miyazakis 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 animes potential for providing unique perspectives on race, gender, landscape, identity, and Japan's historical and mythological past. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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

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