University Bulletin (2015-2016)

FILM 92a Internship in Film Studies
Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 98a Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 98b Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 99d Senior Thesis
Students who are candidates for degrees with honors in Film, Television and Interactive Media must register for this full-year course. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 100a Introduction to the Moving Image
[ hum ]
An interdisciplinary course surveying the history of moving image media from 1895 to the present, from the earliest silent cinema to the age of the 500-channel cable television. Open to all undergraduates as an elective, it is the introductory course for the major and minor in film, television and interactive media. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 110a Film Production I
[ ca ss ]
Preference given to Film,Television and Interactive Media majors and minors.
An introduction to the basic principles and techniques of fictional narrative motion picture production. Each student will produce three short films. The films will emphasize dramatic development and creative storytelling through image composition, camera movement, editing, and sound. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 110b Motion Picture Editing
[ ss ]
Preference given to film, television and interactive media majors and minors.
Students will develop visual literacy through a study of the editor's role in cinematic storytelling. The course provides an overview of the craft's history and theory and offers practical training in editing digital video with Final Cut Pro. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 124b Israeli Documentary Film
[ ss ]
Follows the documentaries in Israel from the founding of the state through the thematic liberalization after 1967 and the creation of radical narrative in the wake of 1973. A further transformation in the 1990s led to very personal stories. Special one-time offering, spring 2015.
Mr. Fisher

The following courses are approved for the program. Not all are given in any one year. Please consult the Schedule of Classes each semester.

AMST 35a Hollywood and American Culture
[ ss ]
This is an interdisciplinary course in Hollywood cinema and American culture that aims to do justice to both arenas. Students will learn the terms of filmic grammar, the meanings of visual style, and the contexts of Hollywood cinema from The Birth of a Nation (1915) to last weekend's top box office grosser. They will also master the major economic, social, and political realities that make up the American experience of the dominant medium of our time, the moving image, as purveyed by Hollywood. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Doherty

AMST 116b Race and American Cinema
[ hum ]
From its earliest beginnings, the history of American cinema has been inextricably--and controversially--tied to the racial politics of the United States. This course explores how images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, and Latino/as are reflected on the screen, as well as the ways that minorities in the entertainment industry have responded to often limiting representations. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 129a From American Movie Musicals to Music Videos
[ ss ]
Examines the spectacle of song and dance in movie musicals and music videos, beginning with the earliest talking pictures in the late 1920's and continuing to the present. Particular emphasis will be on technological change, race, gender and the commodification of culture, among other topics. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell

AMST 130b Television and American Culture
[ ss ]
An interdisciplinary course with three main lines of discussion and investigation: an aesthetic inquiry into the meaning of television style and genre; a historical consideration of the medium and its role in American life; and a technological study of televisual communication. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Doherty

AMST 131b News on Screen
[ ss ]
An interdisciplinary course exploring how journalistic practice is mediated by moving image--cinematic, televisual, and digital. The historical survey will span material from the late-nineteenth-century "actualities" of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers to the viral environment of the World Wide Web, a rich tradition that includes newsreels, expeditionary films, screen magazines, combat reports, government information films, news broadcasts, live telecasts, television documentaries, amateur video, and the myriad blogs, vlogs, and webcasts of the digital age. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Doherty

AMST 136a Planet Hollywood: American Cinema in Global Perspective
[ hum ss ]
Examines the global reach of Hollywood cinema as an art, business, and purveyor of American values, tracking how Hollywood has absorbed foreign influences and how other nations have adapted and resisted the Hollywood juggernaut. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Doherty

ANTH 26a Communication and Media
[ ss ]
An exploration of human communication and mass media from a cross-cultural perspective. Examines communication codes based on language and visual signs. The global impact of revolutions in media technology, including theories of cultural imperialism and indigenous uses of media is discussed. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. McIntosh

CLAS 151a Greece, Rome, Myth, and the Movies
[ hum ]
Explores classical mythology through several key texts to demonstrate the strong connections between antiquity and our own society, especially as revealed in an array of modern cinematic experiments. Charts the transformation of these myths for our own cultural needs. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

COML 164b Reading Screenplays
[ hum ]
Focuses on the secret life of the film script in Hollywood and world cinema. Before a movie can be made, it needs to be scripted. The course links the reading of screenplays in an academic context to script-development practices in the film industry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Arellano

ENG 27b Classic Hollywood Cinema
[ hum ]
A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison

ENG 50b American Independent Film
[ hum ]
Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr

ENG 60b The Films of Disney
[ hum ]
Surveys Disney narratives from early shorts to recent features. Includes discussion of studio style, concept of the child viewer, social impact, and responses to changing world technologies. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr

ENG 61b Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
[ hum ]
Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 70a Magic Lanterns to Movies: The Origins of Narrative Film
[ hum ]
Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 130a Representing Poverty
[ hum ]
Explores influential theories of poverty and their impact on filmmakers. Compares cinematic tools and traditions for representing the lives of the world's poor. Includes neorealist classics and many contemporary variations. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Irr

ENG 147a Film Noir
[ hum ]
A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays in criticism and theory. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison

ENG 150a Sex and Cinema
[ hum ]
Studies the construction and representation of sexuality, both normative and deviant, in film from the 1930's to the present day. We will pay particular attention to evolving strategies of censorship and resistance to it. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison

ENG 177a Hitchcock's Movies
[ hum ]
A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison

HISP 193b Topics in Cinema
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students; conducted in English. Course may be repeated for credit.
Topics vary from year to year but might include consideration of a specific director, an outline of the history of a national cinema, a particular moment in film history, or Hollywood cinema in Spanish. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell or Mr. Rosenberg

NEJS 181a Jews on Screen: "Cohen's Fire Sale" to the Coen Brothers
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Survey course focusing on moving images of Jews and Jewish life in fiction and factual films. Includes early Russian and American silents, home movies of European Jews, Yiddish feature films, Israeli cinema, independent films, and Hollywood classics. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

NEJS 181b Film and the Holocaust
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Examines the medium of film, propaganda, documentary, and narrative fiction relevant to the history of the Holocaust. The use of film to shape, justify, document, interpret, and imagine the Holocaust. Beginning with the films produced by the Third Reich, the course includes films produced immediately after the events, as well as contemporary feature films. The focus will be how the film medium, as a medium, works to (re)present meaning(s). Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

NEJS 182a Jewish Life in Film and Fiction
[ hum ]
Film and fiction are windows through which we can view transformations in American Jewish life. This course concentrates on cinematic and literary depictions of religious, socioeconomic, and cultural change over the past half-century. It does this through films and fiction, which reflect and help to shape shifting definitions of the American Jew. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fishman

POL 171b National Intelligence: Theory, Practice, and Cinematic
[ ss ]
Examines the challenges of developing useful "intelligence" for policymaking, the nature of covert operations for intelligence, and how spy/espionage films shape popular understanding of intelligence and covert operations. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Burg

THA 155a Icons of Masculinity
[ ca ]
Using icons from movies, fiction, theater, and television who represent manhood, this course explores how American men have defined and performed their masculinity. Various archetypes, including the cowboy, the gangster, the rogue cop, the athlete, the buddy, the lover, and Woody Allen are examined. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg

CHIN 130b China on Film: The Changes of Chinese Culture
[ hum nw ]
Taught in English. All films viewed have English subtitles.
Focuses on the enormous changes under way in Chinese society, politics, and culture. Helps students to identify and understand these fundamental transformations through a representative, exciting selection of readings and films. Usually offered every second spring.
Staff

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria

ENG 22a Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to filmic adaptations of Indian novels from Bollywood, Indian art cinema, and Hollywood. Readings include novels as well as theoretical approaches to adaptation. Films include Slumdog Millionaire, Pather Panchali, Devdas, Guide, Umrao Jaan, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria

FILM 124b Israeli Documentary Film
[ ss ]
Follows the documentaries in Israel from the founding of the state through the thematic liberalization after 1967 and the creation of radical narrative in the wake of 1973. A further transformation in the 1990s led to very personal stories. Special one-time offering, spring 2015.
Mr. Fisher

FREN 141b Introduction to French Cinema: un certain regard
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Introduces students to the major trends in French cinema since the forties (New Wave, "cinema du Look," feminist cinema, cartoons, "comédie à la française," beur cinema, etc.) Students will learn the critical vocabulary necessary to describe the formal aspects of film and to analyze films from a variety of theoretical approaches. Films will also be viewed as cultural products influenced by their social, political contexts and their modes of production and diffusion ("l'exception française.") Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Voiret

GECS 167a German Cinema: From Berlin and London to Hollywood
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Discusses the commercial, cultural, political, and aesthetic relationships between German, British, and American film making as it developed over the course of the twentieth century. We will discuss how filmmakers from Austria, Great Britain and Germany became influential in the shaping of genres and styles that became synonymous with Hollywood filmmaking. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nolden

HBRW 170a Take I: Hebrew through Israeli Cinema
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: Five semesters of Hebrew or permission of the instructor. Four class hours per week.
An advanced culture course that focuses on the various aspects of Israeli society as they are portrayed in Israeli films and television. In addition to viewing films, the students will be asked to read Hebrew background materials, to participate in class discussions, and to write in Hebrew about the films. Usually offered every spring.
Mr. Ofengenden

HISP 192b Latin American Global Film
[ fl hum nw ]
Prerequisites: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Studies films that re-imagine Latin America’s place in the world, focusing on how images are produced and consumed transnationally. ‘Traditional’ topics like cultural identity are refashioned for international consumption, and local issues are dramatized as already crisscrossed by global flows of which the films themselves partake. Close analysis of visual representation and film techniques will be complemented in each case by a study of historical and cultural background. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Rosenberg

HIST 131a Hitler's Europe in Film
[ ss wi ]
Takes a critical look as how Hitler's Europe has been represented and misrepresented since its time by documentary and entertainment films of different countries beginning with Germany itself. Movies, individual reports, discussions, and a littler reading. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kelikian

HIST 170a Italian Films, Italian Histories
[ ss wi ]
Explores the relationship between Italian history and Italian film from unification to 1975. Topics include socialism, fascism, the deportation of Jews, the Resistance, the Mafia, and the emergence of an American-style star fixation in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kelikian

JAPN 135a Screening National Images: Japanese Film and Anime in Global Context
[ hum nw ]
All films and readings are in English.
An introduction to some major directors and works of postwar Japanese film and anime with special attention to such issues as genre, medium, adaptation, narrative, and the circulation of national images in the global setting. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Fraleigh

NEJS 178b Masculinity and Femininity in Israeli Film, Literature, and Culture
[ hum ]
Taught in English.
Focuses on Israeli film, literature, and culture, exploring how film and literature represent and establish masculinity and femininity. Examines the ways in which film and literature reflect the politics, religions, conflicts, and ideologies of Israeli society. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Szobel

RECS 150a Russian and Soviet Cinema
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
Examines the Russian/Soviet cinematic tradition from the silent era to today, with special attention to cultural context and visual elements. Film masterpieces directed by Bauer, Eisenstein, Vertov, Parajanov, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov, and others. Weekly screenings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

SAS 130a Film and Fiction of Crisis
[ hum nw ]
Examines novels and films as a response to some pivotal crisis in South Asia: Independence and Partition, Communal Riots, Insurgency and Terrorism. We will read and analyze texts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in an effort to examine how these moments of crisis have affected literary and cinematic form while also paying close attention to how they contest or support the narrative of the unified nation. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh

SAS 150b Indian Film: The Three-Hour Dream
[ hum nw ]
A study of Hindi films made in India since 1947 with a few notable exceptions from regional film, as well as some recent films made in English. Students will read Hindi films as texts/narratives of the nation to probe the occurrence of cultural, religious, historical, political, and social themes. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh

WMGS 141a Gender in Iranian Cinema
[ hum nw ]
With a primary focus on gender, this class explores post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema. Topics include politics; family relationships; women's social, economic, and political roles; and Iran's religious structure. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Shavarini

COSI 153bj Mobile Game Design
[ sn ]
Prerequisites: COSI 11a and 12b.
An introduction to the design, implementation, testing and analysis of mobile games including the architecture of 2D and 3D games, interaction with mobile input/output devices, networking for multi-person games, and mechanisms for marketing, distributing, and maintaining mobile games. Usually offered every second year. Offered as part of JBS program.
Mr. Hickey

COSI 164a Introduction to 3-D Animation
[ sn ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took COSI 65a in prior years.
Covers the fundamental concepts of 3-D animation and teaches both the theory underlying 3-D animation as well as the skills needed to create 3-D movies. Students demonstrate their understanding of the concepts by creating several short animated movies. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Hickey

ENG 49a Scriptwriting for the Short Film
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Addresses many facets of writing screenplays for short films (under eight pages). Students develop two to three scripts through creative exercises, rewriting, and critiques. Supplementary screenings and reading focuses on the particulars of short fiction and cinematic writing. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 79a Directed Writing: Beginning Screenplay
[ hum wi ]
This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129b in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Weinberg

ENG 139b Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum wi ]
Prerequisites: ENG 129b or ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Weinberg

FILM 110a Film Production I
[ ca ss ]
Preference given to Film,Television and Interactive Media majors and minors.
An introduction to the basic principles and techniques of fictional narrative motion picture production. Each student will produce three short films. The films will emphasize dramatic development and creative storytelling through image composition, camera movement, editing, and sound. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FILM 110b Motion Picture Editing
[ ss ]
Preference given to film, television and interactive media majors and minors.
Students will develop visual literacy through a study of the editor's role in cinematic storytelling. The course provides an overview of the craft's history and theory and offers practical training in editing digital video with Final Cut Pro. Usually offered every year.
Staff

MUS 107a Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music
[ ca ]
Prerequisite: Any music course or permission of the instructor.
A course designed to give students basic studio skills and a context for listening to and working in electronic music. Topics include basic acoustics, sound design, digital and analog recording techniques, and assignments on the pioneers and current practitioners of electro-acoustic music. Involves hands-on experience in the use of MIDI-controlled synthesizers, samplers, production equipment, and includes individual studio projects based on individual studio time. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

THA 125a Acting for the Camera
[ ca ]
A process-based acting class. Emphasis is on developing the actor's ability to work honestly and creatively in front of the camera. All work is videotaped. Students regularly review their performances in order to advance their critical understanding of the work. Usually offered two consecutive years with a third-year hiatus.
Staff