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. $50 Studio Fee.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (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, please contact Jason Middleton at jason.middleton@rochester.edu.

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

(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 go to https://www.sageart.center/resources.

Location

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

This course examines developments and innovations in Russian cinema from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day as the Russian film industry struggled to move from a command to a market economy and adapt to new challenges. We will consider these films as works of cinematic art, as cultural/historical artifacts, tools of propaganda and nation building, aesthetic manifestations of political dissent, and (most importantly) how these ways of "thinking about film" relate to one another and reflect the cultural and ideological complexities of post-Soviet modernity. Fall 2022 subtheme: Depicting War

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 420 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

Students will create and perform multi-media site-specific choreography and installations that will be captured and re-mixed. Geared for students of dance, film and photography, this course will explore creative collaboration, composition, lens based art and post-production. Students will be encouraged to curiously and playfully embody manipulations of movement material and play with technology to better understand different points of view and to explore the elements of site, space, shape, time and effort to see how they affect quality and content. Students will gain hands-on experience with digital photo and video equipment and editing software, and will serves roles both in front of and behind the camera. $50 Equipment Usage Fee.

Location

O'Brien Residence Hall Room 104 (TR 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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

Morey Room 504 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

This course introduces students to the poetics of television. We will explore the ways that television tells stories, creates characters, and constructs worlds; the significance of genre, style, and form to those stories, characters, and worlds; and the relationship between television and the horizons of social, historical, and aesthetic experience that television opens as one of the most important culture industries of the last 100 years. Much of our class will be devoted to watching TV and discussing what we watch, especially scripted television such as sitcoms, soap operas, procedurals, “quality” television, web series, and so on. Students will also come to understand poetics, a method that goes back to Aristotle, as an approach useful to the study of any medium, especially when combined with methods enabled by digital technologies. 

Location

Lattimore Room 210 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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

Hylan Building Room 203 (TR 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)

Italian Neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s constituted Italian cinema’s greatest contribution to filmmaking worldwide and to the history of cinema. This course will provide students with a solid understanding of Neorealist themes and style through the exploration of its three principal directors: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. Discussion topics will range from the Nazi occupation of Italy and the Partisan Resistance, to southern Italy and postwar living conditions. Films include: Rome Open City, Paisan, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D., The Earth Trembles and Bellissima. Assignments include: historical 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

Hylan Building Room 201 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course provides a transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema during this period, we will address a number of aesthetic and technological issues. For example, how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

Location

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

This class explores global trends in film history from 1989 to the present. In considering the contemporary period of cinema, we will look at the technical, social, and formal aspects of the medium. Of interest will be new digital technologies for production, post-production, and exhibition in both commercial and independent filmmaking (e.g., CGI, HD, Motion Capture, High Frame Rate), all of which are linked to a network culture that emerges after 1989. We will also focus on geopolitical developments and social upheavals such as the end of the Cold War, the events of September 11, 2001, economic and cultural globalization, and the post-2008 financial crisis as all these altered various national/regional cinemas and genres (e.g., the spy film, the horror movie, the comedy-drama, and action movies). We will screen the works of major figures in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century world cinema from the United States, Mexico, China, and Hong Kong to Palestine, Iran, India, and Senegal. 

Location

Lechase Room 163 (TR 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. $50 Studio Fee.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 101 (MW 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

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

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. 

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

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This introductory course uses film and the film industry to understand several trends and elements central to Latin American society and culture in the twentieth century. Students will engage the tension of film's role in teaching history, and telling untold stories, alongside the medium's limitations. The class will be structured around five main themes: Latin America and the United States; Class, Race and Gender; Revolution and Repression; Underdevelopment and Informality; and (Im)migration. By the end of the course, students will have a strong introduction to modern Latin American history.

Location

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

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 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.

Location

Morey Room 504 (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.

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Location

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

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 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.

Location

Morey Room 504 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)