This course teaches the basic concepts, vocabulary, and critical skills involved in interpreting film. Through readings and lectures, students will become more informed and sophisticated observers of the cinema, key examples of which will be screened weekly. While the focus will be on the form and style of narrative film, documentary and avant-garde practices will be introduced. The class will also touch upon some of the major theoretical approaches in the field.

(Film Studies Component Course.) An examination of the gothic--a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity--in American literature and culture, with an emphasis upon issues of race and gender. Topics include the gothic; gothic sexuality; Southern, Northern, and national gothic; freakishness and grotesquerie; and visual gothic. Focus on fiction, with some film and photography.

For all who stay to the end of the credits, purchase soundtracks, and argue over who should have won the Oscar for Best Score, along with anyone else interested in the undervalued importance of music to the general effect of a motion picture, this course will explore and discuss the myriad ways in which these two media interact. The course will focus on classic scores by Herrmann, Morricone, and Williams, as well as the uses of existing music in films of Bergman and Kubrick.

Focus on the discussion and analysis of films by German women directors from Lotte Reiniger, pioneer of animation films, and Leni Riefenstahl, controversial director and mythmaker of the Third Reich, to such trailblazing women directors of the New German Cinema as Margarethe von Trotta, Jutta Bruckner, and Helma Sanders-Brahms.

In this historical survey we will study three periods from the first half of the cinema's past (1832-1932): its invention, its silent days, and its transition to sound. From the optical effect of the phenakistoscope (1832) through the efforts of Edison and Lumi're, from the evolution of the classical style of Hollywood to the montage theories of the Soviets, from the adoption of sound-on-film to the benshi strikes in Japan, this course will introduce students to the fascinating figures, institutional structures, art and technologies that built the world's cinema.

We will be reading a number of key feminist texts that theorize the construction of sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots.

In this course we go behind the scenes and behind the screens of anthropological films, museum exhibitions, 'small media' events such as television, and publications such as National Geographic Magazine, to explore the social contexts of image production, distribution, and interpretation. Focusing on visual activism and ethics, we consider how popular portrayals of our own society and of others' both shape and are shaped by hierarchies of value in the material world.

How are we to respond to Indian popular film, which is notorious for its distracting song and dance numbers, meandering story line, and visually overblown spectacles? This seminar will develop historical and theoretical approaches to Indian films as what scholar Lalitha Gopalan calls a 'constellation of interruptions.' Students will examine feature films in class, write critical papers on scholarly essays, and pursue independent research projects on various aspects of Indian film.

The relationship between colonizer and colonized is two-fold: on the one hand a visible, immediate (military, economic, and political) domination, and on the other, a more subtle, less visible (ideological) domination.

A study of the visions, plans, and frustrations of intellectuals taking part in the revolutionary changes of twentieth-century China. Beginning with the radical youth of the May Fourth Movement, the course will also include Confucian reactions to modernism, moderate constitutionalist solutions, and the anarchist and Communist movements. Topics for discussion will include the ideology and cultural biases of the historian/observer, the role of intellectuals in society, and the impact of European ideas--Marxism, Ibsenism, Darwinism, among others--on traditional Chinese culture.