This course uses film to interrogate an array of issues defining Israeli and Palestinian societies, including competing views of national histories. The course will open with looking at the emergence and development of Israeli and Palestinian cinematic discourses and proceed to explore the dynamic of representation from the period of British mandate, through establishment of the state of Israel, and the onset of Palestinian diaspora, the wars of 1948 and 1967, to the current era.

Often referred to as the only indigenous American film style, "film noir" in its very appellation reveals that its major effects (for certain modern conceptions of cinema) lay elsewhere. We will examine film noir in its American heyday (1945-1957) and how it came to be a major propelling force in the new European cinema of the 1960's (Godard, and the Cahiers du cinema).

What is possible when the mode of film scholarship departs from the printed word and inhabits the form of the media it examines? As the media environment evolves, critical engagements with film are emerging in the digital landscape, with the videographic essay one of the most prominent. This is a course in planning, scripting, and editing videographic essays in film scholarship. Making a videographic essay is much like making a film, often with similarities to documentary and the essay film.

Course taught in English. This course examines the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, alongside with some of his poems and essays on film, to understand the contemporary relevance, 100 years after his birth, of his critique of capitalist society and cultural homologation, pivoting on the radicalization of his sexual and ideological diversity and of an idea of cinema as recovering the experience of "poetry."