Course Catalog

Over the past twenty years, Granada, HBO, and the BBC have been creating series such as The Singing Detective, Cracker, MI5, The Sopranos, and The Wire that are much darker and more persuasive and perverse than anything else on television or on the big screen. Students will examine these 'visual texts,' and will also outline one or two series of their own, working on individual scenes that will be dramatized in class.

Course divided into theoretical and practical sections. The practical half of the course includes daily exercises in "hands-on" documentary research, scripting, sketching and shooting in the streets of Paris, with small video cameras, producing work that will then be critiqued in class. The theoretical component surveys the history of documentary film and different approaches to making documentaries.

This course surveys the richest and most alluring
period of cinema from its peak following the end of World War II, through the global movements that revitalized its decline, to its subsequent reformation by digital technologies at the turn of the century. It was by no coincidence that cinema was dubbed the art of the 20th century: taking advantage of technological advancements, newer generations of filmmakers reinvented the expressive possibilities of cinema by turning their cameras directly onto social realities and into individual psyches. Each week, the course will explore key developments in international film cultures by situating films within broader social, political, and cultural contexts. The course will also map the influential aesthetic trends,significant critical developments, and fundamental institutional factors that altogether configured cinema as a voice for political comment as well as a medium of entertainment. Through weekly readings and class discussions, students will learn about the irresistible power of international cinemas and the differing national traditions that resisted the ideological and commercial
dominance of Hollywood.

The course analyzes the work of one of the greatest, most influential film directors in the history of cinema, whose prodigious career spanned the silent and sound eras. Hitchcock made major contributions first to British film, then to the classic Hollywood style. Students begin by establishing Hitchcock’s concept of pure cinema, and then trace the biographical origins of his fascination with “fright”. They also explore the major influences in his work. The director’s move to American cinema focuses on his volatile work relationship with his producer, David Selznick, in films like Rebecca and Spellbound. A study of this transition culminates in an in-depth analysis of Hitchcock’s debt to the Surrealists, the subsequent fascination of the French New Wave for his works and his role as an inaugural auteur. Hitchcock’s command of his craft and his technical innovation to create masterpieces of suspense transformed modern cinema.