Film Studies Course Offerings: Fall 2009
To Students: The film courses listed below will earn credits toward either the major or minor in Film Studies. All students are responsible for checking the Queens College course bulletin to determine what prerequisites, if any, they need to enroll in any particular course.
Students seeking advisement on
enrollments for Film Studies courses offered should contact:
Film Studies Program
Office: G 102-C Phone: 718-997-2956
Email for advisement: amy.herzog@qc.cuny.edu
R = required course for Film
Studies major and/or minor E =
elective course
| CMLIT 241: Literature and the Movies | (E) 3 hr, 3 cr |
| M 1:40-4:30 PM | Prof. F. Rizzo |
A study of the ways in which literature and the movies have strongly influenced each other. The course will investigate problems arising from the relations and conflicts between these two different media.
| ITAL 250: Italian Cinema and Fashion (NEW COURSE) | (E) 3 hr, 3 cr |
| M 9:15 AM-12:05 PM | Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli |
The course will be dedicated to the intersection of two art forms: fashion and cinema, both able to stir the imagination. Although costumes, mise-en-scene and décor are an integral part of the cinematic experience, they have seldom received the attention they deserve in courses on cinema. The course will examine films from a variety of epochs in which these features have a central role. In Italy, especially, the connection between fashion and cinema has always been strong and the two worlds have influenced each other through the decades. We will start with the magnificent sets and costumes of the epic film Cabiria (1913) by G. Pastrone. This movie, which soon became a cult, fascinated Martin Scorsese and echoes of its costumes reappeared in Roberto Cavalli’s 2006 evening dresses. In the late 1940s American Hollywood actors and directors started to spend time in Rome, filming in Cinecittà and frequenting the Roman fashion houses of Fernanda Gattinoni and the Fontana sisters. This encounter was one of the major factors that contributed to the global launch of Italian fashion and Italian cinema and enabled Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti to become known to world cinema. These directors also had an amazing eye for costumes, set, and choice of locations vis-à-vis the aesthetic of the scene. In the cases of Antonioni and Fellini, some of their characters belonged to the world of fashion and media culture and are amazing depictions of the world full of celebrities that they captured in the initial manifestations. Featuring great moments of fashion, Fellini’s 1960 film La dolce vita shocked the church with the way it depicted stylish men and beautiful women living in Rome. In1972, Fellini even showed an ecclesiastical catwalk in his Roma, a theme that was taken as inspiration for Prada’s fall 2008 collection that intertwined the sacred and the profane. These are just some of the many examples on which we will draw in the course. We will also view the work of leading Italian costume designers who won Oscars for two American films: namely, Gabriella Pescucci for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Milena Canonero for Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.
For further information, please contact the instructor: epaulicelli@gmail.com
| MEDST 143: "Film History I, Origins to 1930" | (R) 4hr, 3cr |
| M 1:40-5:20 PM | Staff |
This survey course examines the history of cinema from its origins in the late 19th century to the transition to sound film in the late 1920s and early 1930s. We will study a range of films from all over the world, but we will focus in particular on U.S. films. Topics covered will include: the rise of the star system, early film industry economics and business strategies, German Expressionism, French Impressionism, and the ongoing struggle for silent film preservation.
| MEDST 200: "Principles of Sound and Image" | (R) 4 hr, 3 cr |
| T/Th 10:15 AM-12:05 PM | Profs. McLeave/Buchsbaum |
An examination of the dominant visual and sound conventions characteristic of most film, television and video production. Lectures illustrated with a wide range of media examples present the basic principles of sound and image combinations, including technological principles, shot language, composition, editing, and storytelling. Students apply these principles in the production of two short video projects. Students are also introduced to the fundamentals of the FINAL CUT PRO editing software program, which they will use to edit their second video project. Readings cover both practical material and theoretical discussions of visual and audio parameters.
| MEDST 240: "Styles of Cinema" | (R) 4 hr, 3 cr |
| Th 12:40-4:30 PM | Prof. Julian Cornell |
The course will introduce students to the systematic "formalist" analysis of film stylistics in both non-narrative and narrative modes. We will focus on the way filmmakers use the film medium's techniques and strategies to develop constructions of and reflections about aspects of human lives and their societies. The major course text will be David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. and it will be supplemented by other readings. Films of widely differing types will be screened, including A wide variety of films will be screened including Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock); Citizen Kane (Orson Welles); 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick); Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard); All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk) and The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buņuel) among others.
| MEDST 245: "Screenwriting" | (E) 3 hr, 3 cr |
| W 1:40-4:30 PM | Prof. Richard Vetere |
This class will help students develop a screenplay from an original idea to the first act of a finished script. In a simulation of Hollywood's story development process, students will begin with a pitch, move to a treatment of their screen story, then act one of their scripts. Special attention will be paid to the fundamentals of storytelling, including creating memorable characters; three-act structure; and story points, such as the "inciting action" and the "climax." This will be achieved through an in-class writing workshop and exercises; screening mainstream, foreign, and independent films; reading film and TV scripts from accomplished writers such as Ted Tally and Larry David; and studying excerpts from screenwriting bibles, including Robert McKee's Story and William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade.
| MEDST 263: "The American Film Industry" | (E) 3 hr., 3 cr. |
| W 5:30-9:20 PM | Prof. Juan Monroy |
After World War I, the American film industry became the dominant cinema throughout the world, dwarfing national cinemas in number of productions and in box office revenues. Since then, the industry vertically integrated into the Hollywood studio system, was broken up by the US courts, challenged by television and new media, acquired by global conglomerates, and challenged by emerging cinemas in East and South Asia. By almost any measure, however, the American film industry remains a dominant force in the culture industries of the world. This course examines the economic history of the American film industry since 1912. We will also focus on the technological and cultural changes of the industry, and pay special attention to how filmmakers have responded to successes and challenges of the US film industry and the changes to its business practices.
| MEDST 265: "Producing Independent Media" | (E) 3 hr, 3 cr |
| M 6:30-9:20 PM | Prof. Elizabeth Foley |
The course presents an overview of the current media landscape and of all aspects of independent production: from development and fundraising through pre-production, production, post-production and distribution. Students will also explore the various roles that independent producers play: from small business owner and project developer to line-producer, amateur legal expert and distribution manager. Applicable to all kinds of programming, including feature films, documentaries, TV, cyber programming and other media, the course will focus most on project development, presentation, and funding. Students emerge from the course with one project "presentation packaged" and ready for further development, funding, and pre-production.
Required reading: Film & Video Budgets, 4th Updated Edition by Deke Simon and Michael Wiese and a course packet.
| MEDST 342W: "Film Genres: Disaster Films" | (E) 4 hr, 3 cr |
| W 5:30-9:20 PM | Prof. Julian Cornell |
From the early days of cinema, spectacles of destruction have been a staple element and critical industrial component of popular film. While the disaster film has been disparaged as formulaic special effects dominated pabulum, this class will explore how disaster films can be seen, not as mindless entertainment, but as allegorical treatments of prevailing social and political conflicts in American society, as a malleable form of ‘crisis cinema’ that allows for historical tensions in society to be articulated, managed and resolved. In particular, the course will consider the questions of race, class, gender and nationalism that, rather than being byproducts of the spectacle of obliteration, are frequently their defining and structuring elements. As we examine the unique, recurring elements of the disaster film genre, we will also address the question of how films about a society facing extinction express an ideologically inflected and often conflicted version of American nationalism. Screenings will include When Worlds Collide, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Independence Day, Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds among others.
| MEDST 344W: "National Cinemas: Scandinavia" | (E) 4hr, 3cr |
| Th 5:30-9:20 PM | Prof. Julian Cornell |
Scandinavian Cinemas will provide students with an introduction to the cinemas of the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The course will explore how films have attempted to understand the profound social and cultural changes wrought by, and since, the two World Wars, economic prosperity, the establishment of the modern social welfare state, and transformations of traditional notions of class, gender and ethnic identity. By examining a variety of representative films from these five countries that share many cultural traditions, yet are also distinct from one another , we will investigate the process by which these films envision, imagine and critique national and Nordic identities.
| MEDST 345W: "Great Directors: Pioneering Women Filmmakers" | (E) 4 hr, 3cr |
| M 1:40-5:20 PM | Prof. Elizabeth Foley |
Pioneering Women Filmmakers will explore the historical significance and artistic achievement of a diverse group of women filmmakers, including one of the earliest narrative filmmakers, Alice Guy Blaché; movie-star-turned-director Ida Lupino; the only women of the French New Wave, Agnes Varda; the world's most prominent contemporary South Asian director, Mira Nair; and animation pioneer Mary Ellen Bute, among many others. Each director’s film will serve as a text for our semester-long discussion of film as product and as art form. The class will feature readings from noted theorists and film historians including Mary Anne Doane, Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell and Vito Russo.
| MEDST 346W: "African Americans in American Film and TV" | (E) 3hr, 3 cr |
| F 9:15-12:05 | Prof. Franklin Cason |
An historical and critical consideration of the diverse ways African Americans have participated in American cinema and television. Course will examine prominent actors, directors, and other industry workers as well as critical discourses about the subject.
| SOC 381W: "Alfred Hitchcock: A Case Study in the Sociology of the Movies" | (E) 3 hr, 3 cr |
| T 6:30-9:20 PM | Prof. Robert Kapsis |
This course will examine the films and career of Alfred Hitchcock from a variety of sociological and aesthetic perspectives. We will analyze Hitchcock’s motion pictures as well as his popular television series in relation to the network of influences which combined to produce them, including Hitchcock's personal eccentricities, the contexts of the thriller genre, the film industry, the film art world, and the wider society. We will also explore how Hitchcock's work has influenced the careers of important American directors, especially Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jonathan Demme. Students will learn how to analyze films from a number of social, historical, and aesthetic perspectives and to develop the analytic skills for discussing films and other cultural products in relation to contemporary social life.