- ENGL 104. Introduction to Film
- The goal of this course is to develop students' abilities to view films critically and to deepen their understanding of the film experience. The course first teaches analysis of narrative strategies, shot properties, mise-en-scène, acting, editing, and the use of sound in films, especially classical Hollywood movies. The course then focuses on the study of different genres and styles of films, including documentaries, feminist films, westerns, musicals, and melodramas, in terms of how they present ideological points of view and/or fulfill certain wishes of the spectator. English 104 is an appropriate prerequisite for English 273 (the second half of the English film sequence) and other advanced film courses.
The course presents one film program including a feature film per week, shown in a required screening lab on Mondays or Tuesdays. Each section meets for two 75-minute lecture-discussion sessions per week. All sections use Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art as an introductory textbook and additional reading assignments (essays and book chapters) available on library reserve or in a photocopied reader. Sections are designed so that each student contribute extensively in the discussions; attendance and participation are crucial in this course.
The minimum formal assignments are about 12 pages of expository writing (often 3 short papers, but some instructors prefer 1 short and 1 long one, and some may assign more writing); a midterm; and a three hour final exam; some instructors also give quizzes. On the exams, most instructors give a factual section (identification, brief answer) plus a section of essay questions.
This course earns 3 credit hours and qualifies as a General Education course in Humanities and the Arts.
3 Hours.
NOTE: Students enrolling in CINE 104 must register for both a lec/dis section and a lab section.
51307 lab AB1 03:00 PM - 05:50 PM M 101 Armory
51308 lab AB2 07:30 PM - 10:20 PM M 101 Armory
51309 lec/dis AE1 08:00 AM - 09:15 AM WF 148 Armory
51311 lec/dis AE2 09:30 AM - 10:45 AM WF 148 Armory
51312 lec/dis AE3 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM WF 148 Armory
51314 lec/dis AE4 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM WF 148 Armory
51315 lec/dis AE5 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM WF 148 Armory
51317 lab BB1 03:00 PM - 05:50 PM M 101 Armory
51318 lab BB2 07:30 PM - 10:20 PM M 101 Armory
51319 lec/dis BE1 08:00 AM - 09:30 AM TR 148 Armory
51320 lec/dis BE2 09:30 AM - 10:45 AM TR 148 Armory
51321 lec/dis BE3 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM TR 148 Armory
51322 lec/dis BE4 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM TR 148 Armory Newcomb, J
51323 lec/dis BE5 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM TR 148 Armory Camargo, S
[Same as ENGL 104.]
- CINE 193. Undergraduate Seminar
- Topic: Spanish Culture in Film
This course will seek to build a more complex understanding of Spanish cinema as well as the contemporary issues that it reflects. These will include questions like nationalisms, immigration, notions of gender and sexuality, the memory of the Civil War and the Franco regime, and the transition to a democratic government.
We will also use scholarly articles that will help us to understand the construction of contemporary Spain, and provide us with tools that allow us to analyze cultural materials, so as we are able to apply them critically both inside and outside the classroom.
This course meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10 to 11.
We will screen films on Mondays and during part of Wednesday's class and dedicate the rest of the class as well as the Friday meeting for discussion. All films are subtitled in English: no knowledge of Spanish is required.
3 Hours.
Monday: 9:00-10:50 a.m.,145 Armory
Wednesday, Friday: 10:00-10:50 a.m., 145 Armory
Instructor: Ana Vivancos.
Course Number: 52237
[Same as CWL 151, Section AV.]
- CINE 261. Survey of World Cinema, I: The Beginnings to the Coming of Sound
- Consideration of filmmaking trends established in the silent era and their incorporation into the sound film. Types of filmmaking covered include the Hollywood studio film, German Expressionism, Soviet montage, French avant-garde, and the birth of documentary filmmaking. Coverage of these styles and movements will include some attention to social, cultural, and political backgrounds. Directors studied will include important figures such as Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Eisenstein, and Murnau. This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Literature and the Arts. Students must receive authorization to enroll by contacting the Associate Director of the Unit for Cinema Studies at (rleskosk@uiuc.edu).
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 1:00-2:50, 101 Armory.
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion.
Course Number: 29888
- CINE 273. American Cinema since 1950
- This recently redesigned course (previously called “intermediate film studies”) is not a film history course per se, but rather examines how selected films made in the U.S. after World War II realize or engage key concepts such as genre, authorship, narrative, gender analysis, and the spectacle of violence. The course addresses these issues in the production, consumption and study of cinema in the context of major transitions in the American film industry over the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st century. Among those developments are the shift away from the dominant stylistic and ideological models of “classical Hollywood” during the 1960s; the emergence of the “New Hollywood” in the 1970s with its stylistic eclecticism and emphasis on formulaic blockbusters; and the still-developing globalization of contemporary American cinema, in which non-American filmmakers are molding some of the most significant Hollywood productions of the new century. Required viewing of a feature film each week in a Wed. afternoon (3-5:30) screening lab; the course also requires active discussion, regular attendance, substantial reading from a course packet. and several essays. Prerequisite is a prior college-level film course such as English/Cine 104 or Cine 261 or 262, or permission of the instructor.
3 Hours.
Instructor: Sandra Camargo.
51324 lab AB1 Wednesday: 3:30 - 5:50 p.m. 148 Armory
51325 lec/dis AD1 Tuesday & Thursday: 2:00 - 3:15 p.m. 148 Armory
NOTE: Students must register for both lab and lecture-discussion section.
[Same as ENGL 273.]
- CINE 361. Film Theory and Criticism
- This course provides a survey of the historical development of film criticism and an introduction to the current range of theories.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 1:00-2:50 p.m., 147 Armory
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion.
Course Number: 49026
- CINE 373. Special Topics in Film Studies
- Topic: Haunted Cinema
This course is a genre study with a couple of twists. It is structured not around a classic Hollywood genre like the western or horror film, but around a narrative motif, the experience of haunting, which bridges many of the key genres of film history. Haunting scenarios have been combined with almost every classic Hollywood genre– horror (both supernatural and psychological), sci-fi, teenpic, romance, western, religious allegory, family drama, even comedy. Some narratives of haunting provide us with powerful metaphors of interconnection in a fragmented modern world; others allow us to imagine the idea of religious belief in a skeptical age. At their best they create generic hybrids that link our psychic fantasies to sociopolitical realities in vivid and powerful ways.
Examining this “genre that is not one” will allow us to pursue main three avenues of inquiry:
(1) To ask what’s problematic and what’s productive about the entire notion of cinematic genre;
(2) To explore how cinema allows us to explore issues of identity, gender, and sexuality which are crucial to our psyches, yet often taboo in most aspects of our everyday lives:
(3) To consider what haunts cinema itself: what forces and fears, normally repressed by the moneymaking machinery of Hollywood, return to speak to the viewer in haunting narratives? In other words, what does cinema tell us about itself through these narratives that it can’t or won’t speak of in any other way?
We will focus primarily on recent Hollywood productions, but will pay some attention to earlier films that establish key conventions for the haunting film. Among the films we are likely to screen are Nosferatu, The Mothman Prophecies, The Ring, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Turn of the Screw, The Sixth Sense, The Others.
The workload will include several brief film analyses; two or three formal papers; extensive participation in class discussion; and a final exam. The principal text will be a photocopy reader. The prerequisite for this course is at least 3 semester hours of college level work in literature and/or film. One film course is recommended.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 3:00-4:50 p.m., 160 English Building
Instructor: Tim Newcomb
Course Number: 51327 [Same as ENGL 373.]
- CINE 395. Special Cinema Studies Topics
- Topic: New Map, New Media
In the past two decades the arts of the moving image have seen major changes both in their possibilities of material form (digital vs. analogue) but in mass delivery systems (CD-ROM, DVD, HD, web-based downloads/streaming video). Simultaneously, the European Union has been come a political and monetary reality and globalization has become a site of anxiety and political unrest in France. Long celebrated for its auteur-centered, “cinéma d’art et d’essai” (art house and experimental cinema), how has the French film industry, as well as its more independently minded auteurs, responded to these shifts? What are the continuities between the digital moving image from “film” to CD-ROM and webart and how do national traditions seem to play a role in the conception or economics of reception of both films and new media art works?
Specific questions and issues considered over the course of the semester include: digital aesthetics, analogue nostalgia, animation, motion capture, the “language” of new media, the interface, virtual realities, relation and form, gallery/street/web/home viewing spaces, the French “cultural exception,” television in the film industry, CD-ROM vs internet art.
While the course’s focus is on France, for purposes of comparison we will look at films from other European and North American sources. All films are subtitled and readings available in English. Readings include essays from classic film theory and critical works on new media art and culture.
Requirements:
two 5-6 page papers,
one 8-10 page paper,
On-line writing assignments/discussion.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 5:00-6:50, 147 Armory. [Meets with FR 443.]
Instructor: Margaret Flinn.
Course Number: 52156
[Same as FR 443.]
- CINE 395. Special Cinema Studies Topics
- Topic: History of Documentary Film
This course will be an historical survey of non-fiction film from the birth of cinema to the present day. We will also consider important theoretical problems associated with filming actual events and real people, including the idea of objectivity in documentary, the ethics of ethnographic cinema, and the mixing of fiction and non-fiction modes in certain films. The goals of this course are to introduce students to important historical trends and concepts and to help them develop the critical and analytical skills needed to understand the structure, style, and rhetorical strategies of documentary films. We will examine “actualities,” newsreels, the Griersonian documentary, cinema vérité and Direct Cinema, ethnographic cinema, the personal documentary, the nature film, the “synthetic” documentary, and recent trends in documentary filmmaking. Readings will include work by Erik Barnouw, Brian Winston, Carl Plantinga, Linda Williams, Bill Nichols, and others. Possible films to be screened include Nanook of the North (1922), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Land without Bread (1933), Song of Ceylon (1934), Triumph of the Will (1934), Night and Fog (1955), Don’t Look Back (1967), In the Year of the Pig (1969), Harlan County, USA (1972), Forest of Bliss (1986), The Thin Blue Line (1989), History and Memory (1992), Tongues Untied (1995), Microcosmos (1996), Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Stevie (2003).
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 5:00-6:50, 147 Armory.
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion.
Course Number: 49270
- CINE 419. Topics in Russian & East European Film
- Topic: Hungarian Transnational Film
Planned for this semester's topic is a close
study of major film-makers working domestically in Hungary, 1960-
2008, and ex-Hungarians who migrated to the film studios of Vienna,
Berlin, Paris, London, and Hollywood (1919-60). Among the "domestics"
will be directors like Szabo, Meszaros, Jancso; actors like Balint,
Cserhalmi, Latinovits; camerapersons like Sara & Somlo. Among the
"expatriates" will be producer-directors like Curtiz, Korda Brothers,
Fejos; actors like Lukas, Lugosi, Lorre, "Cuddles" Sakall; camera-
persons like Alton, Zsigmond, Kovacs (Laszlo). Films to be shown,
from high tragedy to low comedy, will include weekly features and
numerous shorts, among them many rare items from the instructor's
own collection.
3 Undergraduate Hours. 4 Graduate Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 9:00-9:50, 147 Armory.
Friday: 9:00-10:50, 147 Armory.
Instructor: Steven P. Hill.
Course Number: 44033(3 Undergraduate Hours)
Course Number: 44034(4 Graduate Hours)
[Same as SLAV 419.]
- CINE 470. Topics in Italian Cinema
- Topic: The Peplum Film
In the late 1950's and early 1960s, there was an explosion of enormously popular Italian films starring American bodybuilders and set in mythical antiquities. With titles like Hercules vs. the Moon Men or Goliath vs. the Dragon, these films are mostly remembered today for their unintentional humor and low production values, and their emphasis on the spectacularly muscled male body means that they are more likely to be shown at gay film festivals than for their original audience: straight teenage boys. The peplum films (as they are known in Europe) offer a rare opportunity to examine a series of key questions: how does a genre like this come to be popular? why did it die off? what does the peplum tell us about the formation of masculinity? what is its sexual orientation, if any? Finally, why have such films returned in the last 5 years (in American, this time), from Gladiator to 300 to Beowulf?
3 Undergraduate Hours. 4 Graduate Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:00-2:50 PM, 114 Transportation Building
Instructor: Robert Rushing.
Course Number: 42985 (3 Undergraduate Hours)
Course Number: 49580 (4 Graduate Hours)
[Same as ITAL 470.]
- CINE 493. German Cinema I
- This course examines German film from its inception until 1945. We critically engage with the legacy of German Expressionism and examine the development of film aesthetics from the revolutionary use of montage to Leni Riefenstahl’s monumental films in the Third Reich. Issues to be discussed include the intersection of aesthetics and politics, subjectivity and the formation of the mass, and the relationship between Hollywood and German film. We consider each film in its historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts by reading the discourse on film from this period.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 3:00-4:50 p.m., 147 Armory
Instructor: Tim Gruenewald
Course Number: 51245
[Same as GER 493.]
- CINE 495. Special Topics in Cinema Studies
- Topic: Film in the New Age
The feature-length theatrical film has likely been the most influential visual medium of the last 100 years. This course begins by noting the ways in which classical Hollywood style, convention, and production paradigms were, themselves, based on borrowings and elaborations of older media such as theater, painting, novel, photography, radio, television, and video. We next explore the merging of the classical Hollywood style with contemporary digital technology in Toy Story (1995), Fight Club (1999), Moulin Rouge (2001) and The Illusionist (2006). We then turn to films that fully embrace the style and practices of other graphical media such as painting, photography, cartooning, animation, anime, and the graphic novel, showcasing La Jette (1962), Waking Life (2001), Amalie (2001), Sin City (2005), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Persepolis (2007). With Zelig (1983) and Forest Gump (1994) we challenge our faith in photorealism and work toward developing a more informed appreciation of the unprecedented power of digital technology to mimic, alter, or engage in the photoshopping of our personal and collective senses of history and reality. With A Hard Days Night (1964) we witness the birth of the music video before MTV. Tron (1982), Groundhog Day (1993), Run, Lola, Run (1998), and Final Fantasy (2001) bring us to the video game, a topic we will further consider via "screenings" of video games in our classroom. The growth of viral web movies and YouTube as a wildly successful, collaborative, folk medium will be studied, with a review of landmark web-movies such as "405" and "Troops," as well as parodies and populist political works from the campaign season (Obama Girl). We will review films presented via the Internet, produced on cell phones, and with and through other new media devices. The class will learn about machinima movies (user-created content based on video game engines, cgi, and characters). Most significantly, we will study convergence, where digital and web-based technologies allow for creative combinations of disparate media and styles, asking ourselves where cinema has gone lately, and what may become of it in the next 10 years. Students will attend weekly screenings, contribute group presentations, practice critical analysis of media in class and in online journals, blogs, and wikis, create a multimedia essay in graphic novel format using Apple's Comic Life, and, with a group, create an original new media work. Readings include Hugo Munsterberg's "Why We Go to the Movies"; Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics; Jay David Bolter's Remediation and Writing Space; Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck Susan Sontag's On Photography; Chris Anderson's The Long Tail; and Henry Jenkins' Covergence Culture.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:50, 147 ArmoryFLB.
Instructor: Robert Baird.
Course Number: 41264
- CINE 503. Historiography of Cinema
- Graduate seminar examining the history and practice of writing film history: analyzes various historical trends and approaches to the cinema and the different ways in which they construe the cinema as an object of study, including, but not limited to, the cinema as an art, an industry, and a cultural artefact.
This course is one of two required courses for the Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies.
4 Hours.
Monday: 4:00-5:50, 1140 Foreign Languages Building. (with screening time to be scheduled)
Instructor: Lilya Kaganovsky.
Course Number: 43341 [Also cross-listed as CWL 503 and ENGL 503.]
- ANTH 266. African Film and African Society
- A course on recent feature films produced in African countries. These films are used to provide an introduction to contemporary Africa. Some of these films have received prestigious international awards. The films shown in the class are treated as entertainment, as art, and as documents revealing social issues in contemporary Africa. The course will include readings on Africa, on the countries where the films were made, and on the topics they deal with. After the first two introductory weeks, the students will watch one film per week. Attendance of these screenings and the lectures and discussions is obligatory. There will be exams and weekly writing assignments. This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Non-Western Cultures.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 1:00-2:50, 113 Davenport
Instructor: Mahir Saul.
Course Number: 37071 [Same as AFST 266.]
- FR 552. Studies in French & Comparative Cinema
- Topic: New Map, New Media
In the past two decades the arts of the moving image have seen major changes both in their possibilities of material form (digital vs. analogue) but in mass delivery systems (CD-ROM, DVD, HD, web-based downloads/streaming video). Simultaneously, the European Union has been come a political and monetary reality and globalization has become a site of anxiety and political unrest in France. Long celebrated for its auteur-centered, “cinéma d’art et d’essai” (art house and experimental cinema), how has the French film industry, as well as its more independently minded auteurs, responded to these shifts? What are the continuities between the digital moving image from “film” to CD-ROM and webart and how do national traditions seem to play a role in the conception or economics of reception of both films and new media art works?
Specific questions and issues considered over the course of the semester include: digital aesthetics, analogue nostalgia, animation, motion capture, the “language” of new media, the interface, virtual realities, relation and form, gallery/street/web/home viewing spaces, the French “cultural exception,” television in the film industry, CD-ROM vs internet art.
While the course’s focus is on France, for purposes of comparison we will look at films from other European and North American sources. All films are subtitled and readings available in English. Readings include essays from classic film theory and critical works on new media art and culture.
Requirements:
two 5-6 page papers,
one 8-10 page paper,
On-line writing assignments/discussion.
4 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 5:00-6:50 p.m., 147 Armory
Instructor: Margaret Flinn.
Course Number: 37699 [Meets with CINE 395/FR 443.]
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Unit for Cinema Studies
rleskosk@uiuc.edu
updated 8.25.2008 rjl
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