This course features intensive work on French grammar, with emphasis on the acquisition of basic active skills (speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary building). We will be using the multimedia program French in Action which employs only authentic French, allowing students to use the language colloquially and creatively in a short amount of time. Three hours a week for explanation and demonstration, plus small sections with French assistants. This course prepares students for FREN 103. For students without previous training in French.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester.  The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 488 and FAMS 488.)  This course will examine questions of the origins of cinema and notions of its demise.  From its inception, cinema has shaped and informed a critical relationship to modern popular culture.  Recent technological innovations have dislodged the cinema from its position as a distinctive arbiter of public experience and aesthetic engagement, as new mediums and new methods of dissemination proliferate in our networked society.  Claims about the “death of cinema” and the predominance of “new media” will be investigat

(Offered as ENGL 480 and FAMS 480.)  This seminar will introduce students to the methodologies of film history, covering recent questions in the field of cinema studies as well as more general work on historical and archival practice.  We will explore concepts such as historical spectatorship and reception, the intellectual history of film theory, production and studio history, the history of narrative and form, and national and transnational film history.  Students will also be introduced to the practical matters of historical research such as utilizing special collections (

(Offered as LJST 225 and FAMS 371.)  The proliferation of law in film and on television has expanded the sphere of legal life itself. Law lives in images that today saturate our culture and have a power all their own, and the moving image provides a domain in which legal power operates independently of law’s formal institutions. This course will consider what happens when legal events are re-narrated in film and examine film’s treatment of legal officials, events, and institutions (e.g., police, lawyers, judges, trials, executions, prisons).

(Offered as GERM 368, ARCH 368, EUST 368, and FAMS 368.) This research seminar will explore conceptions of space as they have informed and influenced thought and creativity in the fields of cultural studies, literature, architecture, urban studies, performance, and the visual, electronic, and time-based arts.

(Offered as SPAN 239, EUST 249, and FAMS 355.) This course will consider the filmography of directors who have borne the label “auteur” as a distinction both within Spanish and transnational cinema. Students will explore how “auteristic” cinema has been used as a strategic practice for branding Spanish films, and will study stylistic features associated with each auteur. We will investigate fetishism and dream sequences in Buñuel’s filmography (Un chien andalou, El ángel exterminador, Viridiana).

(Offered as GERM 347 and FAMS 323.)  This course examines the German contribution to the emergence of film as both a distinctly modern art form and as a product of mass culture. The international success of Robert Wiene’s Expressionist phantasmagoria, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), heralded the beginning of a period of unparalleled artistic exploration, prior to the advent of Hitler, during which the ground was laid for many of the filmic genres familiar today: horror film (F.W.