Undergraduate Program

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

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

This course investigates the relationship between humans, machines, and urban environments by examining how the industrial history of the Rust Belt, particularly in Detroit, has shaped music and sound culture. Through practice-based research, students will conduct field recordings of their local urban areas and transform these sounds into musical compositions using non-screen-based hardware devices.  Not Open to Seniors.  Studio Art lab supply fee applied. ​

Location

(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. 

Location

(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

(TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

A production course that focuses on Hollywood-style narrative film production. Students will learn how to communicate in teams, shoot in both a single or multi-cam format, operate and understand how to use gimbals, cranes, and dollies, and create two short films from start to finish. From guidance on character staging, production design, story boarding, camera movement, shot selection, directing actors, editing, and postproduction, NFP is an essential “how-to” for students who are serious about learning and working in the entertainment industry

Location

(MW 4:50PM - 6:05PM)

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

(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. Students will deploy introductory level techniques to create new works at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Not open to Seniors. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

(TR 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This course introduces students to the rich body of disaster literature and cinema in Japan. We will explore how Japanese artists creatively reflected on themes of loss, grief, trauma, survival, and healing; we will critically analyze how disaster writings and films probe the issues of socio-political infrastructure as well as human pain and strength. Described as events that cause “the breach of collective expectations in institutions and practices that make everyday life work” (Curato and Corpus Ong 2015), the “disasters” we encounter in this class include both natural and human-generated calamities such as fire, earthquake, war, atomic bombing, and epidemic. Also covered in this class are writings on “imagined disasters” as found in science fiction and dystopian fantasy (for example, the 1973 novel Japan Sinks by Komatsu Sakyō and its parody “The World Sinks Except Japan” by Tsutsui Yasutaka).

All readings will be in English; knowledge of Japanese language is welcome but not required

Location

(TR 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

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; international horror (especially Japan) and cross-cultural influences with Hollywood. As a research seminar, the course will involve the development of a substantial research project.

Location

(T 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will closely consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Course requirements include class participation, an autobiographical comic, weekly wordless posts, a vocabulary quiz and a final paper/project.  

Location

(MW 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made some of the most challenging and controversial works 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

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

The city in film and literature is never just a physical space - discourses of modernity and urban life are mapped onto real and imagined 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. Class materials and discussions in English.

Location

(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. 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

(MW 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.

Location

(MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This advanced course builds on foundational concepts in contemporary new media art production, integrating emerging technologies with socially engaged practices. Students will refine and expand their media approaches while critically engaging with evolving trends in social practice. Emphasizing experimental methodologies, the course challenges students to develop sophisticated, concept-driven works at the intersection of art and technology.

Location

(MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course uses video and moving images to explore the intersectional roots of the ecological crisis, from pandemics to racial justice and climate disruption. Guided by Félix Guattari's "The Three Ecologies," students will develop Eco-cinematic consciousness through projects involving installation, sound, and networked media, examined within a critical environmental arts framework.  Instructor Permission. Studio Art lab fee applied.

Location

(MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Varrying topics in screenwriting and scriptwriting. This topics course can be repeated (2 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. 

Location

(M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The etymology of the word “anime” works its way through the English “animate” to the Latin “animare”—to instill with life. This course considers both how anime brings philosophy to life and the questions anime raises about the good (and bad) life. This course covers works of Japanese anime from the post-World War II period to the present. We begin with an introduction to the language and theory of Anime Studies. In subsequent weeks, students watch and analyze a variety of anime genres. This course employs a comparative approach to the study of anime: each anime is paired with excerpts from germane works of philosophy or literature. The course concludes with pairings of student-selected viewings and readings. All anime viewed for this course include English subtitling.

Location

(F 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

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

(MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

The great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman once said of Andrei Tarkovsky: “Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” We will view and analyze all seven of his films— Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966/69), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979) Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986)—paying close attention to the development of Tarkovsky’s unique and influential film aesthetic: his principle of direct observation and love of the long take; his interest in discontinuities in space and time; his preference for unconventional narrative techniques; and his well-known attention to nature and the elements. We will read his theoretical treatise Sculpting in Time and position his work vis-à-vis the directors he admired (Dovzhenko, Bergman, Bresson, Buneuel, Kurosawa, Fellini) as well as the legacies of French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and Soviet avant-garde cinema. Taught in English.

Location

(TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Feminism has had a powerful impact on the developing field of film theory from the 1970s to the present. This course will examine the major feminist work on film, moving from the earlier text-based psychoanalytic theories of representation to theories of feminine spectatorship to studies of reception contexts and audience. We will also give attention to the very important role of feminist theory in television studies. Weekly screenings, keyed to the readings, will allow us to test the value of these positions for close critical analysis of the film or television text. Readings to include: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Constance Penley, Judith Mayne, Linda Williams, Jacqueline Bobo, Valerie Smith, Lynn Spigel, Lynne Joyrich, Julie D'Acci.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

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

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)