(Offered as ARHA 335 and FAMS 335.)  This intermediate production course surveys the outer limits of cinematic expression and provides an overview of creative 16mm film production. We will begin by making cameraless projects through drawing, painting and scratching directly onto the film strip before further exploring the fundamentals of 16mm technology, including cameras, editing and hand-processing. While remaining aware of our creative choices, we will invite chance into our process and risk failure, as every experiment inevitably must.

(Offered as SPAN 236, EUST 232, and FAMS 328.) Once severely constrained by censorship laws and rarely exported beyond the country’s borders during its dictatorship, Spanish film has been transformed into an internationally known cinema in the last decades.  This course offers a critical overview of Spanish film from 1950 to the present, examining how Spain’s culture and society are imagined onscreen by Spanish directors.

(Offered as GERM 344 and FAMS 326.)  From Fritz Lang’s thrilling detective mysteries to Tom Tykwer’s hip postmodern romp Run Lola Run, from Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical wit to the gender-bending comedies of Katja von Garnier, this course explores the rich legacy of popular and genre films in the German-speaking countries.

(Offered as MUSI 238 and FAMS 312.)  This course is about exploring, participating in, and documenting the musical communities and acoustic terrain of the Pioneer Valley. The first part of the course will focus on local histories and music scenes, ethnographic methods and technologies, and different techniques of representation. The second part of the course will involve intensive, sustained engagement with musicians and sounds in the Pioneer Valley.

(Offered as ENGL 281, FAMS 220, and ARHA 272.)  “Foundations and Integrations” will be an annual team-taught course between a Critical Studies scholar and moving-image artist.  A requirement of the Film and Media Studies major, it will build on critical analysis of moving images and introductory production work to develop an integrated critical and creative practice.  Focused in particular around themes and concepts, students will develop ideas in both written and visual form.  The theme for spring 2017 will be “The Voice.”

Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov claimed that the movie camera is different from, even superior to, human vision and thus allows us to see in new ways. Many others have echoed this idea about cinema’s powerful impact on our ways of seeing and knowing the world. As an introduction to the study of cinema, this course cultivates in students what Vertov called “the Kino-eye.” Our emphasis will be on narrative film, but with some attention paid to experimental, documentary, and animated works as well.

(Offered as ENGL 180 and FAMS 110.)  A first course in reading films and writing about them.  A varied selection of films for study and criticism, partly to illustrate the main elements of film language and partly to pose challenging texts for reading and writing.  Frequent short papers.  Two class meetings and one screening per week.

Limited to 25 students.  Fall semester:  Professor Hastie.  Spring semester:  Visiting Lecturer Osment.

Fall and spring semesters.

Shortly after the Franco-Prussian War - when there were more bloody corpses in the streets of Paris than at the height of the French Revolution - Monet and some others invented Impressionism.  Rather than grab horror by the throat, as Goya and Picasso did in Spain, they created an earthly paradise.  To this end, some ecstatically immersed themselves in nature; others tapped the gas-lit pleasures of the demi-monde. 

(Offered as ENGL 417 and EUST 417.)  This course explores creative responses to the destruction of European Jewry, differentiating between literature written in extremis in ghettos, concentration/extermination camps, or in hiding, and the vast post-war literature about the Holocaust.  How to balance competing claims of individual and collective experience, the rights of the imagination and the pressures for historical accuracy?  How does the Holocaust in American culture differ from the Holocaust narrated in Jewish or European languages?  Readings from a variety of liter