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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 321

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 juniors 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 Juliet Carello at juliet.carello@rochester.edu

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

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.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 102

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.

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

This course will focus on modern Polish literature and culture and look at cultural heritage that is often considered local, ‘minor’ and inaccessible from the outside. We will explore Polish cinema (Wojciech Jerzy Has, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, etc.) and literature (Conrad, Schulz, Nałkowska, Borowski, Iwaszkiewicz, Miłosz, Gombrowicz, Szymborska, Zagajewski, Tokarczuk, Lem, Kapuściński, etc.), identifying local perspectives as well as global ambitions of Polish authors and artists, looking not only for national dimensions of Polish culture, but checking how it fits into the global cultural marketplace and world literature.

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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. Taught by Prof. Rita Safariants (Ph.D., Yale), who is joining MLC in the fall as assistant professor of Russian.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 431

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 Useage Fee.

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

This course will explore various concepts of mobility and encounters within ethnographic films and texts. Questions we will investigate include: How does one represent a culture? What notions of race, gender, sexuality and national identities are reinforced and challenged in these works? Who speaks for whom and what are the consequences? What kinds of power relationships are hidden or made visible in these films and texts?

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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, attendance at screenings, weekly wordless posts, a vocabulary quiz and a final paper/project.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 102

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.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 182

This course considers feature films as evidence for the cultural history of modern America by considering the role of movies in the social imaginary of the Great Depression and World War II. Films include Little Caesar, Gold Diggers of 1933, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Best Years of Our Lives.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 218

Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of Italy’s major 20th-century artists and intellectuals. He worked as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, playwright and essayist, creating scandal with his radical critique of Italy’s modernization and rising consumer culture in the 1960s. As a director, he made some of the most challenging and controversial works in film history. This course gives students a solid understanding of his films by examining how each work addresses Italy’s transformation from a premodern agrarian and artisanal culture, to a modern capitalist one. Films include: Accattone, Mamma Roma, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Theorem, The Decameron and Salò. To provide students with a foundation in Pasolini’s thought and in film analysis, discussions will focus on both thematic and formal issues, such as Marxist politics, Catholicism, sexuality, homoeroticism, violence and his pastiche style. Assignments include: readings, screenings, papers and a final essay. Readings and screenings will be in English.

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 315

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.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 306

Intro to history, technology, cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention to major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, including a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of the George Eastman House. Same as FMS 247

BUILDING: GEM | ROOM: CURT

This course explores video art processes with an emphasis on landscape, environments, climate change, immigration and migration, global economies, environmental justice, food studies, apocalypse, the Anthropocene, perception of nature, social justice, experimental practices, and emerging technologies. Students will consider time-based objects and sound from eco-artistic perspectives questioning and interrupting conventional narrative forms while embracing innovative techniques to generate new and unexpected results. 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 critical discussions. Permission of instructor. $50 studio fee.

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

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.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 104

The course introduces students to the documentary film genre, offers hands-on experience in documentary filmmaking, and highlights a significant aspect of Italian society: the public university system. Students will actively participate in the creation of a short documentary film which compares Italian and American university education by looking at two specific universities: the University of Siena in Arezzo and the University of Rochester. Previously-shot student-footage on the university in Arezzo (Tuscany) will be analyzed and edited in order to be combined with the footage that the students attending the course will shoot on the Rochester campus. A significant aspect of the course will be establishing direct communication via teleconferencing between students in the two countries. The cross-cultural dialogue that will ensue will constitute a major source of information for the creation of the documentary which will be integrated by readings and films on Italian culture and university life.

BUILDING: DOUG | ROOM: 307

An intensive study of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Japan's most enduring and recognized film auteur. From the 1940s to his death in 1998, Kurosawa’s fifty-year career allows us to consider major cultural, political, and social issues and events that left an imprint on the theory and production of Japanese cinema; we will also consider how classical “Japanese cinema” has been conceptualized through his work. We address the work of individuals (e.g., screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto, composer Fumio Hayasaka) who contributed to Kurosawa’s oeuvre but are recognized a notable creative figures in their own right. Finally, we discuss how Kurosawa’s technique and signature style has influenced the work of other directors. Screenings include Kurosawa's well-known period films as well as less familiar contemporary dramas. Previous course work in Japanese and/or film studies is useful but not required.

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Are we experiencing the end of the world? Popular culture and the media cycle broadcast endless news of developments suggesting the end of human civilization: infertility crises, weather disasters, GMO monsters, class warfare, mass extinction, and infectious diseases, even zombies. This course investigates representations of environmental apocalypse and the new geological era of the Anthropocene in order to understand the cultural politics and history of anxiety about end-times and the meaning of nature, planet, and ecology in our lives. We will read fiction by Cormac McCarthy​, Octavia Butler, and Indra Sinha; screen the films Mad Max: Fury Road, 28 Days Later, World War Z, and Snowpiercer; examine Arcade Fire’s album The Suburbs; and study indigenous survivance poetry and recent environmental theory. The course includes a daylong workshop at the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center in Syracuse, NY.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 161

This course studies how our eating practices are shaped by industrial, political, and ecological processes. To understand the politics, economics, and history of what appears on our plates, we cover topics such as biotechnology, food-preservation, chemicals and fertilizers, fast food, processed food, genetically modified organisms, obesity, superbugs, and the organic, local, vegetarian, slow-food, and food justice movements—primarily from the perspective of artistic, literary, and cultural texts.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 143

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.

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This course will provide an overview of the diverse films that comprise contemporary German-language cinema from the 1960s to the present day. We will explore questions of race, class, gender and national identity in both fiction and non-fiction films. Directors include Harun Farocki, Magarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, Ruth Beckermann, Michael Haneke and Christian Petzold. This course will be taught in English and all films will have English subtitles. No knowledge of the German language is required.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 218

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.

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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 on 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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

PREREQUISITES: FMS 132 - Intro to Art of Film OR FMS 131 - Intro to Media Studies

No description

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

No description

BUILDING: | ROOM:

No description

BUILDING: | ROOM:

No description

BUILDING: | ROOM:

An intensive study of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Japan's most enduring and recognized film auteur. From the 1940s to his death in 1998, Kurosawa’s fifty-year career allows us to consider major cultural, political, and social issues and events that left an imprint on the theory and production of Japanese cinema; we will also consider how classical “Japanese cinema” has been conceptualized through his work. We address the work of individuals (e.g., screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto, composer Fumio Hayasaka) who contributed to Kurosawa’s oeuvre but are recognized a notable creative figures in their own right. Finally, we discuss how Kurosawa’s technique and signature style has influenced the work of other directors. Screenings include Kurosawa's well-known period films as well as less familiar contemporary dramas. Previous course work in Japanese and/or film studies is useful but not required.

BUILDING: | ROOM:

No description

BUILDING: | ROOM:

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.

BUILDING: | ROOM:

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 on 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.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

PREREQUISITES: FMS 132 - Intro to Art of Film OR FMS 131 - Intro to Media Studies

No description

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504