Spring 2022 Undergraduate Courses

Antonia Lant
Tuesdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 648

CINE-UT 15
Class #14467
4 points

Cinema Studies majors only.

This course introduces students to the first three decades of film history. It is designed to provide a foundation for the major, through situating the cinema within a broad cultural, aesthetic, economic, and social context, and through establishing that cinema operated internationally from the start.  This period saw the rise of the studio and star systems in the consolidation of Hollywood; the production and screening of a wealth of non-fiction cinemas; and the formation of an international avant-garde cinema movement. Other topics we will cover include: the wide range of early sources for moving image culture; the earliest forms of cinema; the growth of storytelling through film; film exhibition, film audiences, and film reception; the large impact of women’s film work; film as a central component of modern life; and the development of several national cinemas including German, Japanese, Danish, Russian, and Soviet. Silent filmmaking has never gone away; we will consider how it has persisted, revisited and recycled in later works for the screen.

Recitations
Thursdays
Room 646
                                             Class #      
002:  8:00 – 9:15am                14468
003:  9:30 – 10:45am              14469
004:  11:00am – 12:15pm        14470

Isabella Freda
Mondays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 648

CINE-UT 21
Class # 14471
4 points

Cinema Studies majors only.

This core course examines the background, context, and history of television with an initial emphasis on broadcast and digital eras in the U.S., then expansion into case studies of international television. The approach is comparative, with a focus on television as cultural, social, and aesthetic formation. Topics include histories of technology, economics of media institutions, local and networked intersectional politics, audiences and reception, and questions of representation. We will also pay particular attention to methods and modes of historiography, especially in light of emerging opportunities for online access and digital research tools. Recitation sessions explore readings and screenings through discussion and close analysis.

Recitations
Wednesdays
Room 646
                                             Class #      
002:  8:00 – 9:15am                14472
003:  9:30 – 10:45am              14473
004:  11:00am – 12:15pm        14474

Chris Straayer
Wednesdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 652

CINE-UT 700
Class # 14532
4 points

Cinema Studies majors only. Permission code required.

In this seminar, gender provides a lens for viewing madness as depicted in film, thus producing a focal point within a study of broader issues. How has film translated and incorporated psychoanalytic and psychiatric concepts for popular entertainment? Have these depictions changed over time? Are these representations informed or irresponsible? Do they construct our viewership as empathic or voyeuristic? Remembering the ultimate impossibility of seeing mental processes, we will inspect their cinematic displacements onto characters’ appearances and behaviors and narrative events in films such as Possessed, The Bad Seed, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Butcher Boy, Spider, and American Psycho.  The core UG Film Theory Class is a prerequisite for this seminar. 

Robert Stam
Thursdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 648

CINE-UT 707
Class # 14904
4 points

Cinema Studies majors only. Permission code required.

Before “remix” was called “remix,” it went by many other names, such as: “tradition and the individual talent,” influence, parody, pastiche, burlesque, adaptation, dialogism, the carnivalesque, collage, detournement, refunctioning, intertextuality, and so forth. This course, which should be of interest to students concerned with literature, film, popular culture, and with artistic adaptation in general, will explore artistic and interpretative remix practices that are both very ancient and extremely contemporary. While “remix” is a recent term that evokes internet culture, its roots go back to long-standing traditions in the arts. We will discuss “remix” in both its literal and figurative meanings to explore its long term-geneaologies and its relevance to literature, film, and mass-mediated culture.

What all of the terms and theories and practices cited above have in common is that they refer to processes of recombining or reframing pre-existing materials to create something new. One central thinker in formulating these ideas, long before the advent of the internet, was Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who a century ago articulated key concepts such as dialogism, speech genres, and carnivalesque parody, all relevant to contemporary remix.Another key thinker was French narratologist Gerard Genette with his concept of “transtextuality,” which he defines as “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” The goal of the course is to help students understand transtextual remix both as a longstanding (but also contemporary) artistic process and as a mode of analysis. Contemporary remix practices are rooted in millennial traditions. The course will move constantly across borders between past and present, between literature and film, between the arts and the media, and, where possible, between theory and practice.

Anna McCarthy
Mondays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 635

CINE-UT 710
Class # 14810
4 points

Cinema Studies majors only. Permission code required.

Cuteness is an aesthetic for our times. In this class we will investigate cuteness as a concept under pressure, a deforming way of being in and representing the world. At its edges, cuteness morphs into cruelty or curdles into schmalz. At its centre, cuteness beckons to the infant in all of us. We'll be studying the cute and the cutesy across a range of cultural sites and screen spaces, from rural Ireland to Japan. Our readings span cultural critique, theories of the avant-garde, zoology, and the novel.

Gianni Barchiesi
Fridays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 674

CINE-UT 100
Section 001 (Cinema Studies majors) / class # 20607
Section 002 (Non-majors) / class # 20608
4 points

This course critically addresses US works of animation (from tv, cinema, and video games) that have been made for, and targeted to, adult audiences, especially during the last 50 years. Among the many ways available to approach these works, this course chooses to promote the notion that they have been successful especially insofar they employed animation to exploit various forms of excess, understood both thematically (ex. the satirical, the cute, the ugly, the very stupid…) and aesthetically (the quest for the perceptually verisimilar, as well as its rejection).

This course will then unite a broad historical review of the last 50 years of US adult animation, with a deep look at the mutual attraction between these forms of excess and animation as a mode of moving image-production. Students can expect to acquire and/or refine a skill set for observing and critically handling these works, and, among other things, they will have to show their achievements by coming up with the very class plans for selected sessions during the semester.

This course fulfills the US Cinema requirement.

Hanuel Lee
Thursdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 674

CINE-UT 134
Section 001 (Cinema Studies majors) Class # 20611
Section 002 (Non-majors) Class # 20612
4 points

What is Korean cinema? And what do the history, forms, and aesthetic of Korean cinema tell us about itself? This course aims to present the changing faces of Korean cinema in response to historical and social/political/cultural events: colonialism, war, dictatorship, social movements, capitalism, and globalization. It also aims to delve into what makes Korean cinema national, international or transnational, and post-national simultaneously. Paired with scholarly readings, a broad selection of fiction and nonfiction films from the colonial era to the platform age invites students to review the development of Korean cinema in a chronological sense. Intersecting the readings and films, students will be encouraged to confer with each other about how “the national cinema” as a concept has been negotiated, challenged, and redefined through diverse ways in which each film is produced, circulated, and consumed.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Laura Harris
Wednesdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 670

CINE-UT 236
Section 001 (Cinema Studies majors) Class # 23412
Section 002 (Non-majors) Class # 23413
4 points

This class will focus on neorealism in film.  It will begin with Italian neorealism which emerged in Italy at the end of World War II in the aftermath of the fascist regime and the Nazi occupation.  We will examine Italian neorealism’s groundbreaking use of the city as its studio, its inclusion of non-professional actors and improvised dialog, its emphasis on ordinary people and everyday life, and its exploration of difficult ethical dilemmas in films such as Luchino Visconti’s Obsession and The Earth Trembles, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Paisan, and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D.  We will also consider later films inspired by this mode of filmmaking, viewing examples from New Wave Cinema in France, Parallel Cinema in India, Cinema Novo in Brazil, and other film movements around the world.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Zhen Zhang
Tuesdays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 670

CINE-UT 450
Section 001 (Cinema Studies majors) Class # 20609
Section 002 (Non-majors) Class # 20610
4 points

Critically evaluating select influential scholarship in Asian film studies from the last two decades, this course aims to reconsider and move beyond existing paradigms such as national cinema, world cinema, and transnational cinema, in addition to categories or assumptions derived from traditional area studies with origins in the cold war cultural politics. While critically reviewing literature on specific cases of national and regional cinemas (e.g.; China, Japan, India), we will explore alternative perspectives on trans-Asian and trans-hemispheric film culture histories (for example, film policy, censorship, co-production, traveling genres, festivals), as well as contemporary formations under the impact of globalization and digital media. With a focus on historiography and methodology, the course serves as a forum for developing innovative research projects that cut across disciplinary as well as geopolitical boundaries.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Lukas Brasiskis
Tuesdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 648

CINE-UT 51
Class # 14475
4 points

American cinema has consistently positioned itself at the intersection of technology,  entertainment, and art. In its first sixty years, it gradually developed into a mode of audiovisual  storytelling, aesthetic experimentation, and industrial craftsmanship. By the 1960s, however,  American cinema found itself at a crossroads. Much like US society, filmmakers of the time  sought to formulate a variety of responses to the nation’s radical shifts in cultural identities,  political values, and aesthetic conventions. Focusing on the cultural politics of race, gender,  class, and political ideology, this course chronicles the sixty-year evolution of mainstream,  independent, and experimental American cinema since the 1960s. We will discuss the steady  decline of Hollywood and address the subsequent emergence of a cinema of experimentation,  which New Hollywood had re-appropriated into the “new normal” by the late 1970s. The  tension between normativity and subversion also structures our discussion of the 1980s,  when independent productions challenged Hollywood’s white, middle-class, and domestic  mores and, in doing so, contributed to an ideological and creative overhaul of mainstream  filmmaking. We will then concentrate on the steady dissolution of this vibrant independent  sector into a conglomerate studio system in the 1990s, which, in an era of reactionary politics,  facilitated the conservatism of American filmmaking in the 2000s. Last but not least, we will  consider the impact of the current digital turn in American cinema, in which filmmakers rely on  digital effects to enhance their vision.

This course fulfills the US Cinema requirement.

Recitations
Mondays
Room 646
                                            Class #       
002:  8:00-9:15am                  14476
003:  9:30-10:45am                14477
004:  11:00am-12:15pm          14478

Zoe Jiang
Wednesdays
6:00-10:00pm
Room 648

CINE-UT 56
Class # 14479
4 points

This is an introductory course on modern and contemporary international cinema, with emphases on transnationalism, postcolonialism, and the influences of globalization on film cultures. Important international films instigate our reconsiderations on what cinema is and how new styles, trends, and traditions come into being outside the Hollywood system. The course is organized around weekly case studies of essential moments in national film histories after 1960 – French, German, Italian, Russian, American, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Brazilian, Senegalese, and others. In addition to conducting formal scene analyses and discussing key historical and critical concepts regarding international cinema, we will pay special attention to the cultural, political, and economic factors of different national or transnational cinemas, including their systems of production, distribution, and exhibition.

This course fulfills the International Cinema requirement.

Recitations
Tuesdays
Room 646
                                            Class #       
002:  8:00-9:15am                  14480
003:  9:30-10:45am                14481
004:  11:00am-12:15pm          14482

CINE-UT 901 / Class # 14483
1-4 points variable

CINE-UT 903 / Class # 14484
1-4 points variable

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a faculty member who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who agrees on a course of study and requirements with the supervising faculty member. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses.

To register, you must submit an Independent Study Form. Once the information from your form is verified by your faculty supervisor, you will receive a permission code.

CINE-UT 950 / Class # 14691
1-4 points variable

CINE-UT 952 / Class # 14692
1-4 points variable

A student wishing to pursue an internship must obtain the internship and submit the Learning Contract before receiving a permission code.  All internship grades will be pass/fail.

Dan Streible
Mondays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 1806
Class # 7256
4 points

Email tisch.preservation@nyu.edu to request enrollment permission number.

This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their discovery, acquisition, archiving, preservation, restoration, and reformatting, through their screening, programming, use, re-use, distribution, exploitation, translation, and interpretation. It  focuses on the practices of film and video exhibition in cinematheques, festivals, museums, archives, web platforms, and other venues. The course examines the goals of public programming, its constituencies, and the curatorial and archival challenges of presenting film, video, and digital media. We study how archives and sister institutions present their work through exhibitions, events, publications, and media productions. We also examine how these presentations activate uses of moving image collections. Specific curatorial practices of festivals, seminars, symposia, and projects will be examined.

Robert Stam
Mondays
12:30-4:30pm
Room 674

CINE-GT 2512
Section 002 / Class # 24352
4 points

This course concerns film and media representations of colonial history and its present-day sequels. More specifically, it is devoted to the filmic representation and performance of the inter-related issues of conquest, colonialism, race, and indigeneity as apprehended in a number of different countries. The term media is here meant to refer to a wide spectrum of audio-visual-digital media including feature films, documentaries, TV series, music videos, standup comedy, critical remixes, and internet parodies. The course will see media not as mere illustration of intellectual trends and positions, but as active and productive interventions and a way of seeing these issues in themselves.  

The methodology of the course will be comparative, transnational, and transmediatic, constantly counterpointing colonial and decolonial representations and performances.The larger purpose of the course is to transnationalize debates that are too often seen through a narrow US-American frame. The course assumes that debates about colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, indigenous genocide, discrimination, stereotypes, and affirmative action are all transnational in nature and scope; they are not exclusive to the United States, and they did not start in the 21st century; they go at least as far back as 1492 and the Conquest of the Americas.  

Whatever our background, and whether we know it or not, we have all been impacted in some way by the social stratifications and cultural differences rooted in these longer histories.  The course will examine key concepts such as: Indigeneity, Conquest Doctrine, Eurocentrism, White Supremacy, Colonialist Discourse, Intersectionality, Third Cinema, and Indigenous Media. What do these terms mean? What is the relation between them? How does their meaning vary from country to country? What is their relevance to the media and its representations of history?  

The course will focus especially on media treatments of these issues in Brazil (and to a lesser extent Spanish-speaking Latin America), France, North Africa, and the U.K,  while also touching briefly on Aboriginal Australia, India and other sites, always against a comparative backdrop with the U.S. What are the commonalities and the differences between these diverse situations, both in terms of the debates themselves and in turns of the media, how are they related to colonialism, and how do they shed light on the situation in the U.S?  What can we learn from the social attitudes and artistic practices of these other societies? How have the societies from which we come been marked by colonialism and racism? How are “race” and colonialism seen differently in Brazil, the US, France, and India? How do stereotypes vary around the world?   Why is the theme of racial chameleonism and metamorphosis – for example, blackface, redface, “white Indians” and the like -– so ubiquitous in the popular culture of the Atlantic world? Apart from the specific national zones “covered” in the course, students are encouraged to make the course their own by bringing in other zones or related issues of interest, whether connected to their own background or not.  

If history is “that which hurts,” it is also “that which inspires,” that which edifies and clear our minds through Art and Activist engagement. The course in this sense combines critique and celebration, critique of colonialist institutions and the celebration of artistic creativity. Contemporary critical media does not only take the form of indispensible features like 12 Years a Slave or 13th; it also takes the form of parody, satire, music, remixes, and commentary to be found in figures like Charlie Hill, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Amber Ruffin, the 1491s, and Porta dos Fundos in Brazil, which offer a popular critical pedagogy that entertains while criticizing.

The course will also host visitors with special expertise in these issues. The guests include anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, a celebrated scholar on indigenous Media;  Amalia Cordova, curator of Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous media at the Smithsonian in Washington; Leo Cortana, a doctoral candidate and filmmaker who has a rich experience and analysis of racism as lived in France, Brazil, and the U.S; Native American Dine (Navajo) scholar/filmmaker Teresa Montoya who will show her film Doing Good for the Sheep; and Filmmaker/scholar Nerve Macaspac will talk about indigeneity and race in the Phillipines. The course will feature fiction films like Bolain’s Even the Rain,  Bouchareb’s Hors-la-Loi,  and Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satan, documentaries like Ava Duvernay’s 13th and Joel Zito Araujo’s Negation of Brazil, along with myriad clips, short films, music videos, remix parodies and the like. The readings will bear on antic-colonialism, postcolonialism, intersectionality, and indigeneity.  

Robert Stam is the author of a number of books on topics related to the course, notably Tropical Multiculturalism; A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (1997), and with Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994, new edition 2014) and Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012). His Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transational “Indians,” Media Aesthetics, and Social Theory is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.

Dan Streible
Wednesdays
12:30-4:30pm
CORE-UA 750

Please see the College Core Curriculum website for more information.