>undergraduate courses in film studies

African and African American Studies 121
Please, Wake Up!—Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity
in the Early Films of Spike Lee
Biodun Jeyifo
This course will explore how the intersection of race, gender, class, and ethnicity in the early cinema of Spike Lee works to give his social vision and artistic temper the qualities now commonly associated with his cinematic style. Race seems to be the central pivot of social identity in Lee’s films, but in this course we will explore his remarkable attentiveness to other indices of identity and subjectivity. We will pay special attention to the tension between Lee’s passionate oppositional politics and his intensely personal, experimental, and playful approach to film and its expressive idioms, techniques, and styles. Films to be studied include She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Jungle Fever.

African and African American Studies 134z
Black and White in Drama, Film, and Performance
Werner Sollors
Focus is on the development of “serious” dramas and problem films in their
relationship to the traditions of tragedy and melodrama. Readings from Aeschylus to Adrienne Kennedy accompanied by visits to performances and film screenings. Fresh research in Harvard Theatre Collection encouraged.

African and African American Studies 143
Representing Blackness: Media, Technology, and Power
Marcyliena Morgan
This course explores the concept of race and ethnicity through the analysis of media systems and institutions, communication frames, and symbolic representations and social constructions.

Anthropology 1720
Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Film
Steven C. Caton
Focuses on feature-length commercial films (rather than ethnographic or documentary films) and some of the culture industries (Hollywood and Iran) that produce them. What might an anthropology of film look like? Film theory and cultural studies will be examined for their contributions to the answer to that question. Topics include the culture industry, critical theory, the ethnographic gaze, media studies, modernity, nationalism, and transnationalism.

Chinese Literature 130
Screening Modern China: Chinese Film and Culture
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow
How do Chinese films between the two fins-de-siècles create the spectacle of “China” at home and abroad? Course topics include: the cinematic histories of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the origins of early Chinese cinema; film’s relationship to literary and pop culture discourses; violence and the martial arts genre; history and spectacle (Nanjing Massacre, Beijing Olympics) in film and new media.

English Clr
Introduction to Screenwriting
Danny Rubin
This workshop course is designed to
introduce the art, craft, and business of screenwriting. Students will complete
short scripts and off-beat writing exercises focused on dramatic structure, character development, dialogue, theme, and tone; students will also analyze films and screenplays. By exploring visual storytelling, personal versus commercial sensibilities, and alternative approaches to script creation through the writing of short screenplays, students will acquire the tools, skills, and confidence to create feature film scripts.

English Calr
Advanced Screenwriting
Danny Rubin
This course will build up writing muscles of students seriously interested in screenwriting. Students will write and re-write scenes; altering and developing characters; solving story problems; re-writing dialogue; giving and receiving pitches; film analysis; work-shopping of written materials; and other exercises related to the actual work done by Hollywood screenwriters. Students will be working on a 30–page screenplay.

English 197
Religion and American Film
Jason W. Stevens
Religion has proven a profitable, controversial subject in American cinema. This course will introduce students to the topic by combining narrative analysis, film history, and religious study. Areas of inquiry will include: how has the cinema’s illusionism enhanced the revivalistic power of traditional iconography? How have films shaped Americans’ perceptions of religious nationalism and empire or supported the belief in a civil religion or reinforced the ideology of a Judeo Christian consensus?

History of Science 152
Filming Science
Peter L. Galison and Robb Moss
Examination of the theory and practice of capturing scientific practice on film.
Topics will include fictional, documentary, informational, and instructional films
and raise problems emerging from film theory, visual anthropology, and science studies. Each student will make and edit short film(s) about laboratory, field, or theoretical scientific work.

Indian Studies 123
Bollywood and Beyond: Commercial Cinema, Language, and Culture in South Asia
Richard S. Delacy
This course examines concepts of personhood, community, and culture in South Asia as expressed in contemporary film and literature. Works in Hindi-Urdu and in translation will be examined with emphasis on language as an index of
cultural difference and of broad social shifts, notably the transformation of
audiences from citizens to culture-consumers. Knowledge of Hindi-Urdu is not required. However, there will be a section for students with intermediate proficiency utilizing language materials.

Italian 148
Between Africa and Italy:
Literature, Film, and Cartoons
Giuliana Minghelli
From Emilio Salgari’s ninetheenth century adventure novels to the postmodern
comics of Hugo Pratt, this course investigates the representation of Africa in Italian culture. How does Africa shape the work of modernist writers who lived in Alexandria like Marinetti, Ungaretti, and Cialente, and filmmakers like Pasolini and Antonioni, shooting their postmodern wanderings “on location” in Africa? And reversing the gaze, what is the image of Italy in the texts of recent African immigrant writers?

Italian 168
Picturing Place: Landscape, Literature, and Cinema from
the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Centuries
Giuliana Minghelli and Maria Grazia Lolla
Changing approaches to the experience, the representation, and the interpretation of the Italian landscape from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries through literary texts, visual arts, film.

Italian 185
Births of a Nation: A History of Italian Cinema (1895–1945)
Giuliana Minghelli
The history of Italian cinema (genres, styles, technological and institutional developments) will be studied in connection with the tumultuous unfolding
of the cultural and political history of the nation. A wide variety of works, from Giovanni Pastrone’s ground-breaking epic Cabiria, to Fascist-era melodramas and war movies and the cinematic revolution of neorealism, will be screened and discussed.

Japanese Literature 123
Manga
Adam L. Kern
Surveys the manga—the Japanese comicbook, comic strip, and graphic novel—
from its precursors in classic picturescrolls, pasquinades, and woodblock-printed art and literature; through its progenitors in Meiji newspapers and magazines; to its modern and contemporary manifestations in subgenres like mecha and shôjo. Draws upon critical writings on popular culture, visual culture, cultural studies, literary history, cartoon art, and the poetics of visual-verbal narrative.

Literature 146
Space and Place in Postmodern Culture
Verena A. Conley
Focuses on renewed awareness of space in contemporary theory, literature, and film. Examines notions of space and place under the impact of consumerism and electronic technologies in a global world. Texts and films include Lefebvre, Godard, de Certeau, Wenders, Baudrillard, Perec, Tati, Augé, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, and Verhoeven.

Portuguese 44
Images of Brazil: Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
Clémence Jouët-Pastré
Examines major Brazilian films in their historical, political, and social context. Class discussion also focuses on documentaries, reviews, and critical articles. In-depth textual and grammatical analysis, vocabulary building, reflections on the
similarities and differences of the oral and written Portuguese will lead students to achieve a high level of competency.
Note: Conducted in Portuguese.

Romance Studies 82
The Middle Ages at the Movies
Kimberlee Campbell
Explores major themes of the Middle Ages, from war to the role of women in society, comparing medieval texts to modern cinematographic versions of the Cid, the story of Joan of Arc, and King Arthur’s court, among others. Students will examine medieval source materials as well as modern, developing a critical sense of the social uses for history and the ways in which these may be articulated through film.

Scandinavian 65
Modern Scandinavian Masterpieces:
Doubt, Decision, and Narrative from Kierkegaard to Dogma 95
Lena Elisabeth Norrman and Members of the Department
An introduction to nineteenth- and twentieth century Scandinavian literature and film. We will analyze novels by Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Ibsen, Hamsun, Blixen, Lagerkvist, Myrdal, and Nemi as well as films by Carlsen, Sjöberg, Bergman, Fridriksson, Wallentin, and Vinterberg within the context of seminal cultural movements and historical events. Special attention will be paid to Nordic identity and society beyond the customary stereotypes, including the impact of immigration and multiculturalism. Additional pertinent theoretical and historical readings.

Scandinavian 115
Scandinavian Theater and Film
Surveys Nordic contributions to world drama and cinema, emphasizing the works of Henrik Ibsen, the founder of modern European drama; August Strindberg, the master of the Naturalistic theater; Carl Theodore Dreyer; the great Danish auteur Ingmar Bergman, one of “the poets of the cinema”; and the Dogma 95 directors and their “Vow of Chastity.” In addition to close readings of individual cultural monuments, the course places these works into their broader literary and social
contexts.

Slavic 105
Advanced Russian through Film
In close study of four Russian films of the 1980s and 1990s, this course
explores topics in Russian culture through images and the language of personal interactions among characters. Continuing work on vocabulary building and fluency through speaking practice and written compositions.
Note: Conducted in Russian.

Visual and Environmental Studies 72
Sound Cinema
How does sound change what we see? What new stories become possible? How does the space of cinema change between 1930 and 1960? What happens when we throw color and widescreen into the mix? We’ll seek answers to these questions while investigating the political and industrial contexts of international masters of the medium. Films and filmmakers include: The Blue Angel, Citizen Kane, Rashomon, The Red Shoes; Busby Berkeley, Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, Ozu, and Antonioni.

Visual and Environmental Studies 100b
Introduction to Video Art: Art in Media Culture
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Contemporary artists trying to bridge the gap between art and life have to grapple with the fact that more and more of “life” is lived through mass media. Since the 1960s, many have found in video technology an especially appropriate and flexible means for thinking through this condition. This class examines single-channel video and video installation along with related sculpture, performance, conceptual, and new media art.

Visual and Environmental Studies 163
Soft and Hard: Studio Jean-Luc Godard:
Studio Course
Amie Siegel
Students explore Godard’s films while producing work as studio artists. We will look at genre, pictorial flatness vs. depth, text and image, camera movement, still images, color, asynchrony, and Brechtian tropes in Godard’s cinema of reversed time, perverse interviews, critical politics, and gender. Participants try out processes of inspiration, derivation, and notation in relation to Godard’s oeuvre to enrich their cinematic vocabulary and investigate filmic practices within their own work (video, film, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance).

Visual and Environmental Studies 170
Film and Photography, Ontology and Art
D. N. Rodowick
A critical survey of the principal authors, concepts, and films in the classical
period of film theory. We will study the aesthetic debates of the period in their
historical context, whose central questions include: Is film an art? If so, what specific and autonomous means of expression define it as an aesthetic medium? What defines the social force and function of cinema as a mass art? Weekly readings and discussion will examine major film movements—for example, French impressionism and surrealism—as well as the work of key figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Béla Balázs, Ewin Panofsky, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, and Stanley Cavell.

Visual and Environmental Studies 172a
Film and Photography, Image and Narration
D. N. Rodowick
A survey of debates on photography and film carried out in the contexts of semiotics, structuralism, and narratology from the end of World War II until the early 1980s. In what ways can the image be considered a sign and how do images come to have meaning? Readings will include work by Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Jean Mitry, Noël Burch, Raymond Bellour, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Bordwell, and Gilles Deleuze.

Visual and Environmental Studies 172b
Contemporary Film Theory
D. N. Rodowick
A critical and historical survey of the major questions, concepts, and trends in film theory since 1968. Weekly readings and discussion will examine how the study of film and spectatorship has been influenced by semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, and gay and lesbian criticism, as well as multiculturalism.

Visual and Environmental Studies 175a
Framing the I: Autobiography and Film
Dominique Bluher
Cinema offers many ways of telling one’s own story which range from fictional
features to essay films and works that use found footage. This seminar examines film history’s various modes of autobiographical discourse in the context of philosophical and psychoanalytic considerations of the self as well as of experiments in literary and pictorial self-representation.

Visual and Environmental Studies 180
Film, Modernity, and Visual Culture
Giuliana Bruno
Cinema has changed the way we see and think. Modern visual culture develops
with the art of film. This course considers this major twentieth century shift in visual perception. We look at “motion” pictures as a product of modernity, born
of scientific motion studies, aesthetic and cultural mobility. We relate film to the moving experience of urban space. Key writings and films engage sites of modern movement: home(land) and city; voyage and transport; gender and body.

Visual and Environmental Studies 181
Frames of Mind: Film Theory
Giuliana Bruno
Introduction to the language of film theory aimed at developing analytic skills to
interpret films. Historical survey of classical and contemporary theory beginning with turn-of-the-century scientific motion studies to emotion studies of Hugo Münsterberg, to the virtual movements of our new millennium. Considers Eisenstein’s theory of montage, cultural history of the cinematic apparatus, and the body of physical existence from Kracauer to gender studies. Different theoretical positions open our understanding of films and guide us in reading them.

Visual and Environmental Studies 182
Film Architectures: Seminar
Giuliana Bruno
What is our experience of architecture in cinema? Considering the relation of
these two arts of space, we look at how film and architecture are linked in history
on the “screen” of the modern age. Highlighting the interaction of modernity, urban culture, and cinema, we explore the architecture of film in relation to the
architectures of transit and the culture of travel. Emphasis on readings and case-study analysis to pursue research projects and conduct presentations.

Visual and Environmental Studies 184
Imagining the City: Literature, Film, and the Arts
Giuliana Bruno and Svetlana Boym
How do visual representation and narrative so-called non-normative sexual identities and expressions and literature, film, and the visual arts. Draws on works from an array of countries in the modern period and includes select theoretical, critical, and historical readings. Topics include decadence and experimentation; oppression and resistance; desire, duty, and disease; silence and expression; normalization and radicalism; and the intersections of race, class, language, and nationality.