This course is designed to familiarize new film graduate students with the history and aesthetics of narrative filmmaking. Other key industrial or theoretical elements covered include film authorship, the star system, representation and ideology, and spectatorship. Among the most influential of all film movements, Italian neorealism broke with the theatrical tradition in cinema and gave a new emphasis to the representation of place, the particulars of an actual environment, and the social and material circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Students will examine several major works of Italian neorealism as well as various important predecessors and successors to the movement. We will analyze in detail how representative stars were promoted and managed, and consider how stars embody and represent issues of gender and sexual identity, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and power at particular times.
Specific focus varies.
As topics change, may be repeated for credit. Filmmakers under consideration are likely to include Jim Jarmusch, George Romero, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Vincent Gallo, and the Coens. The course examines the characteristic visual, narrative and thematic elements in their films and places those films in their social and historical context. This course studies the visual styles and cinematic and cultural impact of the work of Akira Kurosawa and Sam Peckinpah. Students learn video production as a technical skill and an art, with practice in the making of narratives, experimental videos, and documentaries.