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Cinema Studies Courses
Spring 2010
The following Cinema Studies courses will be offered during the Spring 2010 semester and may be taken to fulfill requirements of the Cinema Studies Concentration of the LAS Interdisciplinary Studies Major and the Cinema Studies Minor.
Sections not appearing on this list (or not cross-listed with sections on this list) may not be used for either the Option or the Minor. Students in the new Cinema Studies Concentration of the Media and Cinema Studies Major should note that courses not carrying the CINE rubric will not count toward the College of Media requirements of the Major but may be used toward the required eighty hours outside the College. Graduate courses on this list may be taken in fulfillment of the requirements of the Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies.
The descriptions below have been supplied by faculty teaching the courses and apply only to the courses as they are offered during the Spring 2010 semester. Links are provided to the on-line Class Schedule.
- CINE 104. Intro to Film
- The goal of this course is to develop students' abilities to view films critically and to deepen their understanding of the cinema 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.
CINE/ENGL 104 is an appropriate prerequisite for CINE/ENGL 273 (an intermediate course in film analysis) and other advanced film classes. The course presents one film program including a feature film per week, shown in a required screening lab on Monday afternoon or evening. 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 give additional reading assignments (essays and book chapters) available in a photocopied reader or on library reserve. 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 (usually in 3 short essays, although some instructors may assign more writing), a midterm, and a three hour final exam; most instructors also give quizzes. On the exams, most instructors give a factual section (identification, brief answer) and a section of essay questions.
This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Literature and the Arts.
3 Hours. [Same as ENGL 104.]
NOTE: Students enrolling in CINE 104 must register for both a lec-dis section and a lab section.
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48695 lab ABA 03:00 PM - 05:50 PM M 101 Armory
This lab section is open to students enrolled in any of the TUTH CINE 104 lecture-discussion sections.
48696 lab ABB 07:30 PM - 10:20 PM M 101 Armory
This lab section is open to students enrolled in any of the TUTH CINE 104 lecture-discussion sections.
48685 lec-dis AE1 08:00 AM - 09:15 AM TR 148 Armory
48686 lec-dis AE2 09:30 AM - 10:45 AM TR 148 Armory
48687 lec-dis AE3 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM TR 148 Armory Camargo, S
48689 lec-dis AE4 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM TR 148 Armory Capino, J
48688 lec-dis AE5 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM TR 59A English
48697 lab BBA 03:00 PM - 05:50 PM M 101 Armory
This lab section is open to students enrolled in any of the WF CINE 104 lecture-discussion sections.
48698 lab BBB 07:30 PM - 10:20 PM M 101 Armory
This lab section is open to students enrolled in any of the WF CINE 104 lecture-discussion sections.
48694 lec-dis BE0 08:00 AM - 09:15 AM WF 148 Armory
48690 lec-dis BE1 09:30 AM - 10:45 AM WF 148 Armory
48691 lec-dis BE2 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM WF 148 Armory
48692 lec-dis BE3 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM WF 148 Armory
48693 lec-dis BE4 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM WF 148 Armory
- CINE 193. Undergraduate Seminar
- Topic: An Introduction to the Horror Film
The goal of this course will be to help students develop a better understanding of this diverse and constantly evolving genre, its audiences, and the ways in which it has shaped and reflected society over the past century.
In this course, we will examine some of the key studios that have produced horror films at different points in time (such as Universal, Hammer, and New Line); important cycles, sub-genres, and production trends
(e.g., the monster movie, the slasher film, and the recent trend of remaking 1970s low-budget fright films);
the aesthetics and psychological functions of the horror film; and horror’s relationship to its social and historical contexts.
We will view and discuss horror films made at various times and in various nations—including German Expressionist films, the Italian giallo, and Japanese horror (a.k.a. “J-horror”).
We will study a number of major horror film producers and directors such as Val Lewton, George A. Romero, Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Clive Barker, and Sam Raimi.
We will read material on horror film by Stephen King, Noël Carroll, Linda Williams, Stephen Jay Schneider, Robin Wood, Carol Clover, and others.
Some of the films we will watch and discuss include Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), The Haunting (1963), The Exorcist (1973),
Halloween (1978), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Audition (1999), and The Descent (2005).
Requirements: three 5-6 page papers, a midterm exam, and active participation in class discussion.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 10:00-11:50 a.m., 147 Armory.
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion.
Course Number: 50828
- CINE 247. Animation
- A history of the animated film with special emphasis on the technological development of the form, Hollywood theatrical cartoons, non-cartoon animation, Canadian animation, and various theoretical considerations.
Mid-term and final exams, quizzes, fifteen pages of critical writing required.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 3:00-4:50 p.m., 147 Armory.
Instructor: Richard J. Leskosky.
Course Number: 39815
- CINE 262. Survey of World Cinema, II: The Thirties to the Present
- This course will consider a wide variety of film artists and the major movements and styles of the sound era.
We will cover the Hollywood studio film and challenges to the Hollywood system, including documentary and avant-garde movements, as well as alternative modes of narrative filmmaking such as Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.
This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Literature and the Arts.
Students must receive authorization to enroll by contacting the Academic Program Coordinator of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at <rleskosk@uiuc.edu>.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday: 1:00-2:50 p.m., 101 Armory.
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion.
Course Number: 31310
- CINE 273. American Cinema since 1950
- This cinema studies course analyzes selected films made in the last sixty years in the U.S. from key critical approaches including perspectives on authorship, genre, narrative, gender and racial representation, and the impact of spectacle. While it does not offer a film historical survey, the course addresses a range of latter 20th /early 21st century cinematic developments in the context of major concomitant transitions in American film industry and culture. Among the trends we will examine 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 increasingly globalized contemporary American cinema, in which non-U.S.-born/resident filmmakers are molding some of the most significant Hollywood productions of the new century.
Requirements: scrupulously regular attendance of the twice-weekly class meetings and the required weekly film lab from 3-5:20 p.m. Wednesday (screening of the week’s feature film); systematic, thorough reading of the substantial course packet of essays and book excerpts; frequent quizzes; three short analytic essays; and a timetable-scheduled final exam.
3 Hours. [Same as ENGL 273.]
Instructor: Ramona Curry.
32102 lab AB1 Wednesday: 03:30 - 06:00 p.m. 148 Armory
32101 disc-rec AD1 Tuesday & Thursday: 02:00 - 3:15 p.m. 148 Armory
NOTE: Students must register for both lab and lecture-discussion section.
- CINE 373. Special Topics in Film Studies
- Topic: Frontiers and Fortresses: Social Space in Postwar Hollywood Film
Popular films construct powerful accounts of the ways societies are arranged, regulated, and contested through the allocation and control of space. In this course we'll examine how Hollywood films of the past fifty years create spatial models and metaphors for the relationships that define American society, including class consciousness, racial identity, the dynamics of gender, and the regulation of sexuality. We’ll focus on three major Hollywood genres—westerns, science-fiction films, and paranoid thrillers—that each use the space of the screen to examine dominant arrangements of American social space and to imagine alternatives.
The list of films is likely to include all or most of these films: Rear Window, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, JFK, Gattaca, The Right Stuff, All the President’s Men, Lone Star, Boyz n the Hood, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and L. A. Confidential.
The class meets twice a week for two hours, including film screenings (some of which will last longer than 120 minutes). The workload will involve several brief film analyses; two formal papers; extensive participation in class discussion; and a final exam. The principal text will be a photocopy reader.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 10:00-11:50 a.m., TBA
Instructor: Tim Newcomb
Course Number: 46555 [Same as ENGL 373.]
- CINE 395. Special Cinema Studies Topics
- Topic: Art Cinema
This course will explore the history of “art cinema” from the 1920s to the present, focusing on art films produced since the 1950s. We will study numerous film movements and important directors from around the world as we seek to develop a better understanding of precisely how these films have presented aesthetic, ideological, and economic challenges to Hollywood and other mainstream world cinemas over the years. We will examine and interrogate various theoretical and historical approaches film scholars have taken towards art cinema, including models treating art cinema as a style, an institution, and a genre. Our study of art cinema will involve a consideration of the influential role of art house theaters, film clubs, film festivals, and film criticism in promoting and defending art film culture. Film movements and styles to be discussed include French Impressionism, German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism, the auteur-driven European art cinema of the 1950s, new wave cinemas, political modernism, folkloric cinema, and postmodernism. Directors we will study include Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Wong Kar-wai.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:00-2:50 p.m.,147 Armory.
Instructor: Billy Budd Vermillion
Course Number: 31311
- CINE 395. Special Cinema Studies Topics
- Topic: Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film as Social Commentary, 1929 to 1939
With the arrival of sound, the movies from Hollywood in the 1930s learned not only to talk, but also to address the emerging social and economic crises in the United States during a very troubled decade. At the high point of the motion picture industry’s studio system, some productions with a distinctly serious intent directly addressed specific problems in American society. Other motion pictures served as escapism, enabling movie-goers to cope with the problems they experienced on a daily basis simply by leaving them behind for several hours in the luxury of the movie palace. While some films centered specifically on the various national and international crises about which the public learned in newspapers and in other forms of mass media, other films created a fantasy world, where the problems, if considered at all, could be approached symbolically or metaphorically.
With the realization that the public attended the cinema in record numbers during this period, the question for historians and film scholars is whether or not these feature films were merely examples of entertainment and escapism, or, alternatively, did they address in an implicit rather than overt fashion contemporary social, political, and economic issues? Do these films tell us anything about how Americans thought and acted in the 1930s, and to what extent are they useful primary source documents, revealing various perspectives in one of America’s most critical periods? Did they provide insight about such matters as gender, race, and propaganda practices, and did they reveal the political and ethical values of a society in distress? Given the fact that our country presently is striving to emerge from arguably its greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, can these films tell us anything about our own current social concerns?
This course will examine these questions by doing an in-depth study of some of the most memorable motion pictures of this period, representing a variety of film genres from the beginning of the sound era through 1939. Various historical, theoretical, and critical approaches will be considered in the assigned readings for the course and in the weekly lecture-discussions. Students will be asked to write several short papers based on questions from weekly study guides. Also a term paper and prospectus utilizing primary source materials will be required, as will a final exam paper. The prerequisite is either a course in history or a course in cinema studies, and students will be expected to have completed the Composition I requirement.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:50 p.m.,147 Armory.
Instructor: Stephen C. Shafer
Course Number: 48162
- CINE 494. German Cinema II
- Contestations of the National Imaginary in Postwar German Cinema In this course we will examine how the national imaginary has been re-created, critiqued, and transformed in German film time and again since 1945. We will organize our discussions around the following themes, which have been central to the projection and the critique of the German national imaginary: coming to terms with / repressing the past, the relationship with America, Terror and the critique of capitalism, German division and unification, migration. As we will examine the films? contributions to these debates, we will put equal emphasis on their formal analysis and their historical context. The principal questions of this course will allow us to survey important movements and genres of German cinema since WW II such as rubble films, 50s war and Heimat-films, New German Cinema, DEFA films, and migrant cinema. Screenings will include films by Staudte, Beyer, Wolf, Fassbinder, Schl?ndorff, von Trotta, Sanders-Brahms, Akin, Roehler.
3 Hours.
Monday & Wednesday, 11:00-12:50 a.m., TBA.
Instructor: Anke Pinkert
Course Number: 44447 [Same as GER 494.]
- CINE 498. Special Topics Senior
- Topic: Adventures in Cinema Studies Research
This course is designed to help you complete a substantial research project on a topic of your choice. Each week we will spend time talking about research strategies, addressing individual students' research projects, and actually engaging in research (in other words: you get to do some of your homework during class time!). Small assignments throughout the semester will keep you on schedule so that you will have an outstanding piece of writing at the end of the year. Additionally, this is a small class (usually around 10 students), so you will get lots of individual attention from the professor and helpful input from your classmates. Many former cinema studies students have reported that writing their senior research paper in this seminar was one of the most rewarding experiences of their undergraduate career.
While the 498 professors often teaches the seminar on a topic about which they have some expertise (e.g., Spring 2009 focused on Comparative Art Cinemas and the last time Professor Projansky taught it she focused on Girls in Film and Television), this year the course will be organized differently. Together, the class will choose a topic (1) that is fun for and interesting to a majority of the students in the class and (2) that might even intersect with the specific research projects of at least some of the students in the class. (Please note that your individual research projects do not have to—but may—fall within the topic area of the seminar itself.) To that end, I have invited junior and senior majors in cinema studies to offer suggestions and ideas for the topic of the class. Ultimately, we will decide as a class what the topic (or, potentially, topics) of our seminar will be.
All senior Cinema Studies majors are strongly encouraged to take this course to complete their CINE 498 requirement.
3 Hours.
Thursday: 3:00-4:50 p.m., 147 Armory.
Instructor: Sarah Projansky.
Course Number: 48768
- CINE 504. Theories of Cinema
- Seminar on influential theories and accompanying debates about the textual/
extra-textual mechanisms and cultural/ political impact of cinema and related
screen media. The course fulfills the theory requirement for the interdisciplinary
Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies. This course will provide an advanced
introduction to the substantial field of film theory. Attention will be given to
canonical texts of classic and contemporary film theory. This course is one of two required
courses for the Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies.
4 Hours.
Tuesday: 3:00-4:50, 147 Armory.
Instructor: Lilya Kaganovsky.
Course Number: 43351 [Also cross-listed as CWL 504 and ENGL 504.]
- C W L 151. Cross-Cultural Thematics. Section NB
- Topic: Love and Death: from Novel to Film
This discovery course will compare literary works from around the world to their film adaptations.
We will analyze the specific means the different media use to convey a message.
What is lost and what is gained in the transfer? By looking at films made in a different country from the original source in the book, we will ask how cultural tradition influences the film industry.
Another concern will be the relative cost of production and how that factor shapes the producer's vision of a target audience. Works to be examined include Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility
and the film directed by Ang Lee, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the film directed by Lucchino Visconti, Raise the Red Lantern by Su Tong and the film of the same name by Zhang Yimou,
Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and two film versions, one French and one American. We will also study the case of a writer Yukio Mishima who directed and acted in his own film version
of one of his best known fictions. There will be class screenings and the films will also be available in the undergraduate library for individual study. Students will be evaluated on class participation and
will write short response papers as well as give class presentations. There will be a midterm and a final examination.
NOTE: This section is a Discovery course and thus open only to freshmen.
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 1:00-2:20 p.m., G-24 FLB.
Instructor: Nancy Blake.
Course Number: 48055
- C W L 151. Cross-Cultural Thematics. Section RM
- Topic: Love and Death in Indian Cinema
This course will explore the themes of 'love' and 'death' in Indian mainstream (mainly Bollywood) Cinema.
How does the world's most prolific film industry handle these themes? What is the relation between the literary and cinematic representations of love and death?
Is Bollywood cinema a form of social history? Has this cinema ever resisted dominant nationalist and patriarchal ideologies?
In what ways have the forces of globalization changed this industry? These are some of the issues we will explore.
Films will include Shree 420, Sholay, Madhumati, DDLJ, Devdas, Guru etc. All films will be screened with subtitles.
No knowledge of Hindi or any other Indian language is required. This course is open to non-majors
3 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 2:00-2:50 p.m., TBA.
Tuesday: 7:00-9:50 p.m., TBA
Instructor: Rini Mehta.
Course Number: 50282
- ENGL 272. Minority Images in Amer Film
- This writing- (and discussion)-intensive course explores how cinema in the U.S. has represented diverse ethnicities and cultures throughout the 20th century and into the 21s, in relation to each other and to dominant American media conventions and social ideals. The course considers a range of “Hollywood” movies and independently-produced works, with a selected feature film showing each week in the required lab screening. The course earns four hours credit and counts for General Education for Advanced Composition as well as in designated arts and cultural studies categories.
Taking a comparative approach, we will examine how American films have variously employed racial and gender stereotyping through narrative, genre and cinematic means; what historical and economic circumstances may have yielded particular films; and what reception the films have found over time among different audiences [e.g., some possible case studies include Birth of a Nation (1915); Salt of the Earth (1953); Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971); The Joyluck Club (1993); and Smoke Signals (1998)]. While addressing materials related to a wide range of U.S. ethnic groups, the course is not a survey, but rather aims through carefully studying (extensively reading, viewing, writing about, and discussing) selected cases to teach critical, historical thinking about representational practices and media institutions.
Two 2-hour class meetings a week, as well as REQUIRED Wednesday evening lab (screening of the week’s case study feature film). Other requirements include absolutely regular attendance and active class participation; several short essays (some written in-class as “micro-themes”) that focus on readings (a textbook and course packet of selected articles), films, and issues under study (including at least one “supplemental film” watched outside class); a research paper on a selected film or television program; and a final exam.
4 Hours.
Tuesday & Thursday: 9:30-11:20 a.m., TBA.
Wednesday: 7:30 - 9:50 p.m., TBA.
Instructor: Ramona Curry.
Course Number: 43497
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Media and Cinema Studies
rleskosk@uiuc.edu
10.22.2009 rjl |
