Department of English, Film, and Theatre FILM courses 2016-2017

Department of English, Film, and Theatre
FILM courses (Upper level)
2016-2017
(Please keep in mind that these course lists are subject to change without notice. See Aurora Class Schedule for up-to-date info.)
Fall 2016
Experimental Cinema
FILM 2370 (3 cr. hrs.) (Corne)
This course provides an aesthetically and historically grounded overview of experimental film while
asking several important, self-critical questions about the nature of such a venture. What do we mean by
"experimental film"? According to what criteria do certain films count as "experimental"? What are the
origins of alternative labels such as "avant-garde" and "underground," and how do these words resonate
differently from "experimental"? How might the constitution of the experimental film canon—along with
traditional sub-groupings—be challenged and rethought? How has the rise of video and digital media
changed and expanded experimental practices?
Contemporary European Films Directed by Women
FILM 2380 The International Cinema 1(3 cr. hrs.) (McIntyre)
In this course students will engage with European films directed by women, principally from Italy and
France, but also from England, Spain and Turkey. We will begin by looking at films by directors who
achieved international recognition in the 1960s and 1970s and consider these works in the cultural
context from which they emerged. That is, we will see them in light of the aesthetic and moral
commitments informing the Italian Neorealist movement and also in terms of the questions of artistic
authority which are the cultural legacy of the French New Wave auteurs. The moral and aesthetic issues
which exercised these earlier artists will be a foundation for a discussion of films by contemporary
filmmakers, who, in more topical ways, have continued to explore these vital concerns in their films. We
will look at how a new generation of women filmmakers has continued the tradition of “personal”
filmmaking in which the autobiographical impulse intersects with larger cultural concerns about identity,
and particularly feminine identity.
Science Fiction [Sci Fi]
FILM 2460 Film Genres (3 cr. hrs.) (Annandale)
This course will consist of a survey of the science fiction genre. We will focus on the way the films take
inspiration from, and comment on, their broader social context, raising such questions as what exactly it
means to be human. We will also be looking at how the field constantly feeds on its own history, and how
it wrestles with the conflicting impulses to look both backwards and to the future.
Documentary Filmmaking
FILM 3260 Special Topics in Film 2 (3 cr. hrs.) (TBA)
This is a hands-on filmmaking course exploring the creation of documentary film as an art form.
In addition to practical and technical lectures, there are also screenings and discussions of documentary
films; their construction, approach, and technique will be discussed in depth. This is a very creative,
technical, interactive course. Students will be encouraged to explore the ideas we discuss in class with
their own projects.
Topics covered in discussion will include:
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What is the definition of documentary film?
Documentary as the art of documenting
Styles/genres of documentary film
The development of the documentary as an art form
The nature of truth and reality as seen in documentary
How a documentary is written and constructed
Researching and planning a documentary shoot
Technical issues in documentary shooting
How to deal with interviews
Coverage of documentary subjects
How to approach and survive a documentary edit
The role of the internet as an audience for documentary
The role of the documentary in our current industry
Film Production
FILM 3270 Special Topics in Film 3 (6 cr. hrs. – Fall & Winter) (Toles)
Our primary, enormously ambitious goal in this course is to create collectively a feature length screenplay
and shoot and edit the script (to the fine cut stage). In the early weeks of the course we will be reviewing
the fundamentals of sound, screenwriting, directing, and film acting and gathering ideas which will help
us to enlarge and enhance the already existing versions of the story that we’re adapting.
Screenwriting
FILM 3430 (3 cr. hrs.) (Annandale)
An introduction to the techniques and procedures of screenwriting. Students will be expected to complete
a screenplay.
Filmmaking
FILM 3440 (3 cr. hrs.) (TBA)
In order to develop the necessary skills to be a filmmaker, a student must first understand the methods of
technical narrative construction in dramatic filmmaking. There are many complicated tools that need to
be understood and mastered in order to properly realize the scope and potential of a film idea. Within the
framework of narrative film storytelling technique, this course is an introduction to the filmmaking
process.
The goals are as follows:
- Basic understanding of film-making procedure
- Basic understanding of the aesthetics of film-making and film language
- Understanding of basic story-telling techniques and narrative film structure
- Knowledge of film-making terminology
- Knowledge of scripting format
- Introductory knowledge of digital camera equipment
- Knowledge of Final cut Pro editing equipment and procedure
- Basic understanding of film crew responsibilities with special emphasis on directing
- Understanding of on-set procedure
- Understanding of pre-production and post-production procedure
Winter 2017
Sometimes Pus, Sometimes Poetry: Cinema and Israel/Palestine
FILM 2380 The International Cinema 1 (3 cr. hrs.) (Corne)
This course approaches the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through a critical examination of the cinema of the
region, considering the ways in which history, politics, and aesthetics intertwine in several remarkable
documentaries and fiction films released predominantly in the last decade. Topics to be covered include:
nationalism and diaspora; memory and trauma; land and borders; violence, militarism, "terrorism"; and
intercultural (mis )communication. Screenings will be supplemented by readings from short stories,
poetry, a novella, a graphic novel, and key critical texts. No prior knowledge of the region is assumed or
necessary.
Theatre on Film
FILM 2460 Film Genres (3 cr. hrs.) (Groome)
In this course we will study a set of works which have been produced on the stage and then made into
films. In each case both the stage play and the film have become celebrated as "significant" works. We will
consider what makes each work effective in each medium and also discuss the ways in which the
treatment of narrative, character, language, and visual elements vary. The major objective of the course is
to develop our understanding of the challenges and distinctive strengths of each medium and appreciate
why the specific works studied have become iconic.
Amnesia & other Mental Mysteries
FILM 3250 Special Topics in Film 1 (3 cr. hrs.) (Toles)
We will be looking at a selection of films, literary works, and essays which have memory loss and related
threats to identity stability and coherence as their central focus. The course will begin with a quartet of
amnesia films from the 1940s. As Marlisa Santos’s study, The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir
persuasively demonstrates, the years of the Second World War and its aftermath (roughly between
1941-1948) were the period of film history most obsessively preoccupied with amnesia as a theme. The
narratives developed to explore this theme were immediately linked with the newly emerging mood and
style of film noir. I will argue that the gulf between private and social identity dangerously widens for
both male and female protagonists in noir films (as well as romantic melodramas) of the 1940s. In the
previous decade the continuity between the public and private selves of movie characters was reliable
and secure. Even criminals and outsiders had little difficulty explaining who they were and what they
were striving to accomplish to the other inhabitants of a film’s world. Characters were fundamentally
knowable, whatever their degree of disreputability or their penchant for misdeeds. By 1941, that
continuity between public and private selves began to be regularly called into question, and the nature of
identity itself became increasingly enigmatic, often to the point of indecipherability. Story after story
plotted a movement away from socially explicable behavior and action. The motives for conduct become
steadily more perverse and obscure, and a crop of psychiatrist characters emerge to guide lost, wandering
protagonists back to some semblance of belief in social norms and a somewhat tenuous “familiar world.”
Once we have completed our survey of 1940s films and popular amnesia fiction, we will broaden our
investigation to include many other kinds of identity erosion. Forgetting, rather than remembering, will
be postulated as the main condition of our all-too-dreamlike existence. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his
Introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, the topic of memory loss is not merely a gaudy plot device
reserved for soap operas. It “turned up more the harder I looked, and meant more the harder I thought
about it.” He became entranced by works of fiction which not only featured characters suffering from
displacement and amnesia, but which also “entered into an amnesiac state at some level of the narrative
itself—and invited the reader to do the same.”
Intermediate Filmmaking
FILM 3260 Special Topics in Film 2 (3 cr. hrs.) (TBA)
An intermediate approach to making short films, this course covers the main points of classical
filmmaking technique. Basic and/or introductory points of either a technical or theoretical nature will
not be covered, as students are expected to have already learned this in Basic Filmmaking. This is a
course for students serious about continuing to work technically and creatively in the film industry.
Capra and Spielberg
FILM 3400 The Director’s Cinema 1 (3 cr. hrs.) (Toles)
In Director's Cinema (2016) we will be studying the careers of two immensely popular American
filmmakers, Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg, with ample consideration of thematic and stylistic issues,
cultural context, their influence on other filmmakers, and their supreme skill as mythmakers for their
respective eras.
Film Theory
FILM 3420 (3 cr. hrs.) (McIntyre)
In this course we will familiarize ourselves with both traditional and modern theoretical approaches to
the study of film, including theories about the nature of the medium and its difference from the other arts,
about its relation to reality and to the spectator, and about the role of the artist in creating the film’s
meaning. Established approaches provide a context for asking such questions as: What is the quality of
the experience that makes film as an art form different from other visual and narrative arts; how is
watching a film not like looking at a painting or watching a play? More modern theories invite us to ask: Is
cinematic language inherently gendered? What are the political implications of a gendered language of
visual representation? Given the communal nature of film production, of what value are theories of the
auteur? What are the implications of a director or an actor being designated as a film’s primary creative
agent? We will be studying the works of some of the most prominent thinkers who have addressed these
and many other questions from the early days of film’s history through to the 1970s and 1980s.
Subsequently, we will consider current ideas that take us “beyond cinema.” What is cinema now in the
wake of digital media and gaming? Has the idea of “cinema” as we have known it “lost its relevance”?
Through classroom discussions of the readings and films, students will gain a better understanding of
how film theory has evolved over time and develop a theoretical context for their own experience as
viewers.