(Offered as ARHA 441 and FAMS 441.)  Intended for advanced film/video production students, this course will explore creative documentary practice through readings, weekly screenings and production assignments. Each student will complete a series of projects working both as a single maker and in collaboration with other members of the class. Topics may include: shooting the interview; scripting, performance and reenactment; history and narrativity; place and space; ethnography and the “embedded” filmmaker.

(Offered as THDA 353 and FAMS 345.)  In this advanced course in the techniques of creating performance, each student will create and rehearse a performance piece that develops and incorporates original choreography, text, music, sounds and / or video. Improvisational and collaborative structures and approaches among and within different media will be investigated.  The final performance pieces will be presented in the Holden Theater. 

(Offered as RUSS 241 and FAMS 329.)  Lenin proclaimed, famously, that cinema was "the most important art of all" for the new Soviet republic.  This course explores the dramatic rise of Russian film to state-sanctioned prominence and the complex role it came to play in modern Russia's cultural history.  We examine the radical experiments of visionary filmmakers who invented the language of film art (Bauer, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko); the self-conscious masterpieces of auteurs who probed the limits of that language (Tarkovsky, Paradzhanov,

(Offered as FAMS 228 and ENGL 287.)  This course will introduce students to basic Super 8 film and digital video techniques.  The course will include workshops in shooting for film and video, Super 8 film editing, Final Cut Pro video editing, lighting, stop motion animation, sound recording and mixing.  Students will learn to think about and look critically at the moving and still image.  Students will complete three moving image projects, including one Super 8 film, one video project, and one mixed media project.  Weekly screenings will introduce students to a wide

(Offered as ARHA 221 and FAMS 221) This introductory course is designed for students with no prior experience in video production. The aim is both technical and creative. We will begin with the literal foundation of the moving image--the frame--before moving through shot and scene construction, lighting, sound-image concepts and final edit. In addition to instruction in production equipment and facilities, the course will also explore cinematic form and structure through weekly readings, screenings and discussion.

(Offered as ENGL 282 and FAMS 215.)  For better or worse, U.S. broadcast television is a cultural form that is not commonly associated with knowledge.  This course will take what might seem a radical counter-position to such assumptions--looking at the ways television teaches us what it is and even trains us in potential critical practices for investigating it.  By considering its formal structure, its textual definitions, and the means through which we see it, we will map out how it is that we come to know television.

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210.)  An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of a few critical and descriptive terms, together with a selection of various films (classic and contemporary, foreign and American) for illustration and discussion.  The terms for discussion will include, among others:  mise-en-scène, montage, realism, visual pleasure, and the avant-garde.  Two class meetings and one screening per week.

Limited to 35 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Professor Guilford.

(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.

Fall and spring semesters.