Summer 2016 Undergraduate Courses

May 25 - June 30
Wednesdays & Thursdays
6:00-9:00pm

Marie Lascu & Yvonne Ng

CINE-UT 1809
c#5499
4 points

This introductory course is aimed at building foundational knowledge and practical skills in personal digital archiving. The value of personal collections and the need for personal archiving is especially relevant in a world where individuals are constantly engaged in creating digital content to share with friends and family, communicate ideas to the world, and for personal record keeping. Students will learn how to assess their collections and about collection planning, format identification, digitization, basic organization and description, storage and maintenance, and providing access.

This course is applicable to students, scholars, artists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, activists, bloggers, and anyone who has created digital content and wants to manage and maintain access to it in the long-term.

Emphasis will be on audiovisual and photographic materials, although documents and social media will also be discussed. The ultimate goal will be on gaining pragmatic knowledge and outcomes through hands-on practice with born-digital and digitized collections.

May 23 - June 8
Monday-Friday, May 23-27
Tuesday-Friday, May 31-June 3
Monday-Wednesday, June 6-8
12:30-4:30pm

Chris Straayer

CINE-UT 501
c#5532
4 points

NCRD-UT 4504
c#5299

This course will consider popular film and literary representations of psychopaths and sociopaths. We will be interested not only in what horrifies audiences but what attracts them to these figures. When, how, and why are we asked/required to identify/empathize with psychopaths? How do such characters negotiate attractions to and fears of hyper/hypo masculinity? What type of female falls for psychopaths (i.e., into love and/or into death)? How do popular renditions of psychopathy compare and contrast with journalistic and medical discourses on the subject? Several key films/novels from mid 20^th century provide a core for our investigation of a classic contradiction in this characterization: Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, based on novel by Davis Grubb); In a Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray, based on novel by Dorothy Hughes); Brighton Rock (dir. Rowan Joffee, based on novel by Graham Greene); The Talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella, based on novel by Patricia Highsmith); In Cold Blood (Richard Brookes, based on the novel by Truman Capote). More recent films that extend narrative conventions and aesthetic strategies and/or raise new issues include: Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme); The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer); Funny Games (Michael Haneke); I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noé). Students will be assigned to read one novel, participate in discussion of several critical texts, and present/write on their own favorite psychopaths.

June 14 - 30
Tuesday-Thursday, June 14-16
Monday-Friday, June 20-24
Monday-Thursday, June 27-30
12:30-4:30pm

William Simon

CINE-UT 230
c#5534
4 points

NCRD-UT 4505
c#5531

This course will focus on the New York City films of Martin Scorsese.  We shall approach several of the films (e.g. Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence) as filmic examples of historical fiction and most of the other films in terms of their socio-cultural representation of New York City phenomena (e.g. immigration, crime, Wall Street, the art and entertainment industries).  As well, we will be concerned with exploring Scorsese’s “narrative method” – his usages of film form and style – in relation to the above issues.

July 6 - August 15
Mondays & Wednesdays
6:00-10:00pm

Kartik Nair

CINE-UT 302
c#5536
4 points

Over the course of the 20th century, the horror film grew from a disreputable flank of the Hollywood genre machine into a billion-dollar global enterprise. Framed against pivotal moments in the history of the genre, this course focuses on a selection of recent horror films from around the world: post-post-classical meta-horror films from Hollywood, Australian slasher films, Japanese techno-horror, Bollywood ghost films, Nigerian curse films, Korean serial killer films and Pakistani zombie films. Central questions posed are these: (1) How has the production, distribution and consumption of cinematic horror been shaped by the forces of globalization? (2) How do the heterogeneous images, sounds, and circuits of this hundred-year old film form challenge our conception of genre?

July 7 - August 16
Tuesdays & Thursdays
6:00-10:00pm

Julian Cornell

CINE-UT 30
c#5557
4 points

Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki are, arguably, the two best-known and widely acclaimed artists in the history of animated cinema.  Despite obvious differences in style, themes, politics and approach to the animated form, what unites the oueveres of Disney and Miyazaki is their indelible influence on the aesthetics, narratives and cultural significance of animated film and films for children. Founders of two of the most successful independent production houses in cinematic history – the Walt Disney entertainment conglomerate and Studio Ghibli, their films provide insight into the role of autonomous studios in both domestic and global contexts. While Disney’s company has produced innovative films of high aesthetic quality, stunning animation and hegemonic values, Studio Ghibli has managed to equal those lofty artistic standards while crafting complex tales which question the very foundations of the culture from which they emerge.  This course will examine the works of these two artists, producers and production houses in the light of auteur and animation scholarship to interrogate how their respective filmic productions both exemplify and problematize the issue of cinematic authorship and illustrate the cultural function of animation.  Films to be screened will include Snow White, Fantasia, Pinnochio, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.

July 7 - August 16
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12:30-4:30pm

Priyanjali Sen

CINE-UT 503
c#5556
4 points

At the heart of the literature-film debate throbs the issue of fidelity – whether or not a film is faithful to the literary text – and the exalted position usually held by literary classics that has inevitably led most audiences to claim, “The book is better!” Adaptation theory however, has undergone significant changes since George Bluestone's influential text Novels into Film (1957) to Robert Stam's more recent scholarship on Bakhtinian intertextuality, which proposes that each text, acknowledged as adaptation or not, is based upon innumerable earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing. By focusing on American culture and landmark Hollywood adaptations in the 21^st century, this course seeks to re-examine some of the key tropes in Adaptation Studies such as appropriation, remediation, transmutation and dialogization, emphasizing that films have “cultural capital,” and taking into consideration the rapidly growing multimedia-franchise-phenomena (novel/film/videogame/vlogs) that complicates the debates further. Some of the films that will be screened are American Psycho, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Dark Knight, Capote, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Hunger Games, The Great Gatsby and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.