Spring 2017 Graduate Courses

Dan Streible
Thursdays, 6-10pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 6636

This MA-level graduate course examines the ways in which the history of film has been conceptualized, written, documented, researched and revised. Readings include theoretical considerations of historiography, methodological approaches, guides to conducting research, and essays from the field of cinema and media history and cognate disciplines. We examine social, cultural, aesthetic, economic, ideological, and technological histories of cinema. How do we frame questions about film and the historical past that are substantial and answerable? What evidence should we examine to answer these questions? How should we then write a historical analysis that answers them?  

We will not survey the entire history of cinema. However, in roughly chronological sequence, we will consider particular aspects of that history: silent-era film, classical Hollywood cinema, social history and exhibition, nonfiction and nontheatrical traditions, and the digital media that force us to reconsider what cinema is. This eclectic approach is indicative of the recent forms that film history has taken -- de-centering Hollywood, digging through neglected archives, moving past film-specificity to historicize all moving images and sounds.

THIS COURSE IS OPEN ONLY TO 1ST YEAR CINEMA STUDIES M.A. STUDENTS.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Mondays, 6-10pm
Room 674
4 points
Class # 6637

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, social and psychological aspects of the cinematic medium. Theoretical frameworks are approached thematically, rather than chronologically, in order to formulate new conceptual connections between different modes of cinematic inquiry. The course uses the innovative organizational structure of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses to address the relationship between spectators and cinema. Sound, sight, touch, smell and taste provide a way to access and compare theories ranging from classical to digital. Approaching film theory through the senses opens up new ways of thinking about the screen-spectator relationship as the course moves from “external” to “internal” (and mnemonic) associations. Students will study the writing of both classical theorists such as Eisenstein and Bazin, and contemporary thinkers such as Sobchack, Mayne, and Friedberg. Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression, to issues of theorizing film spectatorship. Theory will also be studied alongside examples from popular culture, digital contexts, and contemporary films in order to interrogate certain ideas about cinema and spectatorship that persist despite the medium’s technical and ontological changes. By the end of the semester, students will acquire the critical skills to apply a broad range of theoretical perspectives to films and other media within and beyond the scope of this course.

THIS COURSE IS OPEN ONLY TO 1ST YEAR CINEMA STUDIES M.A. STUDENTS.

Antonia Lant
Wednesdays, 2-5pm
Room 635
4 points
Class # 6651

A seminar on the methods and procedures of writing the doctoral dissertation in Cinema Studies. The course guides students in preparing their dissertation proposal through in-class debate, written feedback from the instructor, and visits from guests with experience in the process. Students will make regular presentations of work in progress, with the goal of finishing their proposal by the end of the semester in readiness for their dissertation proposal defense in May 2017.   The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion.

THIS COURSE IS OPEN TO CINEMA STUDIES PHD STUDENTS ONLY.

Manthia Diawara
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 22488
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 22611

The class explores major issues in African cinema from the politics of representation to authorship and aesthetics. A special focus will be on film language, apparatus ideology, politics, and reception. The main area of concentration will be the cinemas of sub-Saharan Africa. We will look at the aesthetic and political evolution of African films, from the social realist cinema of Sembene Ousmane, to African cinema in the Diaspora, to African cinema as world cinema.

David Bagnall
Mondays, 6:20-9pm
Room 108
4 points
Class # 6638

This course examines documentary principles, methods, and styles. Both the function and the significance of the documentary in the social setting, and the ethics of the documentary are considered.

Jason Fox
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 6643
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 6644

In this course, we will examine the history of documentary media with the aim of constructing sets of continuities from long-standing binary oppositions that have governed its practice and discourse. We take as a starting point the intellectual climate of the 1920’s in which the modern documentary form emerged, exploring how the idea of documentary both absorbed and repelled various strands of ethical, political, and social thought.  From here, our historical perspective will explore and challenge the dynamics between poetics and politics, individuals and collectives, publics and counter publics, idealism and materialism, and approaches to theorizing documentary as an alternately descriptive and indeterminate practice.  Through close readings of particular films and careful study of their formal strategies and aesthetic choices, we explore how documentary images are made to act within larger structures of power and resistance, and how the flourishing of contemporary documentary practice invites us to revisit and revise a set of canonical assumptions over what counts as documentary.  We will look at films from a wide range of periods, places and styles -- including observational, experimental, compilation/appropriation, performative, propaganda, and essay films -- and we will turn to classic and contemporary texts in social and cultural theory, phenomenology, documentary and photography criticism, and film and media theory more broadly.

Dana Polan
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Cantor 102
4 points
c#23443

In the 1950s, a young film fan named Eugene Archer got a Fulbright to go to France where he hoped to write a book on thematically ambitious, prestigious, Oscar-recognized directors like John Ford, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, and William Wyler.  But when he got to Paris, he found out that all the French critics wanted to talk with him about was suspense director Alfred Hitchcock and action director Howard Hawks.  As a famous anecdote has it, Archer quickly wrote back to a friend of his — another budding US film critic — Andrew Sarris with the anxious question, 'Who the hell is Howard Hawks?'  
In the half-century since, film studies has tried to come to grips with the cinema of Howard Hawks, and a plethora of scholarly studies have set out to answer Archer’s blunt question.  On the one hand, Hawks, these studies confirm, was indeed a consummate director of action:  working in genres such as the western, the war film, the detective story, the adventure tale, and so on, Hawks crafted engaging narratives of men on a mission working together, their endeavor externalized into dramas of physicality, of bodies on the line, and rendered by Hawks through a clean, tight cinema focused on movement, men’s corporeal craft, team-work, etc.  Hawks’s cinema here is a crisp functional one (no disturbing flashbacks, here, for instance) that follows guys doing their thing.  
On the other hand, as Peter Wollen’s breakthrough study of Hawks in 1969 demonstrated, the emphasis in Hawks’s cinema on the male group as an action collective is balanced, or perhaps even challenged, by a set of other Hawks films that focus on energetic, adventurous women who challenge masculine supremacy and even show up men to be veritably infantile in their assumptions around violence, rough play, machismo, and so on.  A musical like GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES shows weak men at the mercy of over-the-top powerful women (Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe) while a screwball comedy like I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE centers on a demasculinized man (Cary Grant) who spends much of the film in drag.

This course will examine, then, the worlds within Howard Hawks’s films:  worlds of masculine action but also of feminine challenge to male empowerment, worlds of action and worlds of critique of violence as simplistic solution.  And the content of Hawks’s films will be matched to issues of style and cinematic expression:  what resources of crisp story-telling does he employ to convey tales of men in action and how are these undone in the comedies and musicals (for example, the aggressive style of GENTLEMEN which is a veritable visual assault on masculine dominance)?  The goal overall will be to examine Hawks’s specific place within Hollywood studio system story-telling while thereby employing  him as a case study to capture how American narrative film overall functioned  thematically and stylistically as American popular art.

NOTE: This course is open only to Cinema Studies MA/PhD. Limited enrollment. It will be taught concurrently with CORE-UA 750, an undergraduate survey course.

Dana Polan
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Cantor 102
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class #23398
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class #23399

This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from 1960 up to the present.  While the emphasis will be on the dominant, narrative fiction film, there will be attention to other modes of American cinema such as experimental film, animation, shorts, and non-fiction film.  The course will look closely at films themselves -- how do their styles and narrative structures change over time? -- but also at contexts:  how do films reflect their times?  how does the film industry develop? what are the key institutions that had impact on American film over its history?  We will also attend to the role of key figures in film's history:  from creative personnel (for example, the director or the screenwriter) to industrialists and administrators, to censors to critics and to audiences themselves.  The goal will be to provide an overall understanding of one of the most consequential of modern popular art forms and of its particular contributions to the art and culture of our modernity.

Allen S. Weiss
Tuesdays, 1-5pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23024
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23025

As an elemental articulation of the symbolic, the landscape has always been a primary site of performance: it has served for centuries as the background for popular festivals and courtly extravaganzas; it has functioned as the mythic ground of painting and appeared among the first subjects of photography, and it has more recently been transmuted into the background of most films. Paying special attention to the contemporary hybridization of the arts, this seminar will investigate the following topics in relation to both avant-garde and popular cinema: anguish, Eros and the landscape as symbolic form; landscape, film and the Gesamtkunstwerk; imaginary landscapes and alternate worlds; ecological and technological soundscapes; the aesthetics of dilapidation.

Zhen Zhang
Tuesdays, 6-10pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class #23329
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class #23330

Critically evaluating select influential scholarship in Asian film studies from the last two decades, this seminar 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.

Claudia Calhoun
Thursdays, 6-10pm
Room 652
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class #23502
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class #23503

This course introduces students to the growing field of media industries studies. Focused particularly on U.S. film, television, and transmedia production, this course asks how scholarship can best account for the production of corporate art, past and present. Together we will read new and foundational works by historians, ethnographers, and cultural theorists, as well as work that crosses methods and disciplines. Scholars to be studied include Michele Hilmes, Thomas Schatz, John Caldwell, Jerome Christensen, Henry Jenkins, Alisa Perren, and Jennifer Holt.

Allen S. Weiss
Wednesdays, 3:30-6:15pm
Room 611
4 points
Class #23033

Limited Enrollment. Cross-listed with PERF-GT 2214. Permission code needed. This course requires an application to the instructor. Please prepare a one page double-spaced statement, which includes the following information: 1. Student status: MA/PhD 2. Department/program where you are enrolled, 3. Why you wish to participate in this seminar  4. A summary of your theoretical background 5. Your language competance. Please email this statement to allen.weiss@nyu.edu no later than November 14, 2016.

The reasons for collecting are as complex as the lineaments of the mind, and collectible objects are infinitely diverse. One may collect to relive the joys and mysteries of childhood, to connect to preferred epochs in history, to exercise absolute control over a small portion of the world, to create an aesthetic environment, to further knowledge, to ease anxiety, or to fill a void, whether the lack be an empty room, an unrequited love, or an existential emptiness. Walter Benjamin, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, suggests how collecting can pertain to anything and everything: “Every stone I discovered, every flower I picked, every butterfly I captured was for me the beginning of a collection, and, in my eyes, all that I owned made for one unique collection.” To collect is to categorize, to categorize is to think. In these matters, it is necessary to assay the rhetorical distinctions between anecdote, polemic, critique, and theory, and to consequently distinguish the discursive differentiations between the analytic, the descriptive, the prescriptive, and the proscriptive. Topics will include: monsters and monstrosity; dolls, marionettes and performative objects; temporality and materiality; technology and novelty; passion and erudition; enumeration and accumulation; recipes and menus. Readings will include Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Hollis Frampton, Orhan Pamuk, Susan Stewart.  

Note: No undergraduates or auditors will be accepted into this course.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Thursdays, 1-5pm
Room 635
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class #23500
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class #23501

This new course will explore Cinema Studies within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities (DH). Students will study and create projects at the intersection of computing and Humanities research. Digital tools and platforms, along with the databases they create, have expanded the ways we study moving images and filmmaking traditions.

Despite Cinema Studies’ important contributions to the expansion of DH, the study of moving images and time-based media is usually not at the forefront of DH-related inquiry. One of the course objectives is to therefore place Cinema Studies research at the center of DH methodologies in order to diversify interdisciplinary approaches to both DH and Cinema Studies. In this course, students will study DH practice alongside related theoretical frameworks in order to explore the profound historiographical, philosophical, sociocultural, and institutional imperatives that drive the need for digital tools and computational methods in the study of moving images. This approach will help students establish in-depth connections between theory and practice, and will assist them in planning, prototyping, and creating their own final projects to address significant research questions related to Cinema Studies and other fields.

Part I of the course will focus on a historical and critical exploration of pre-digital and early digital Cinema Studies projects that prefigure the interactive, data-driven, cartographic, and/or computational logic of current DH tools. We will cover a broad historical range of critical making that includes the works of early film theorists-practitioners (such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein), collaborations between computer scientists and artists (including the Bell Labs 1960s experiments), as well as more recent digital projects and tools (Yuri Tsivian, Anne Friedberg, Marsha Kinder, Steve F. Anderson, Stephen Mamber, and many others). In addition, Part I of the course will analyze DH projects that contribute to a relatively new subfield in Cinema Studies: “new cinema history,” which refers to a cluster of new methodologies and digital tools for studying the cultural and social history of cinema and its audiences. We will explore the impact of this new cinema history and of “distant reading” (the collection and computational/statistical analysis of large amounts of text data, rather than the close reading of individual texts) on traditional methodologies in Cinema Studies, through the work of influential DHers such as Deb Verhoeven, Richard Maltby, and Jeffrey Klenotic. Our analysis of these projects will not only focus on technical and methodological aspects, but also on the intellectual, cultural, ethical, and institutional debates regarding the use of digital tools in the Humanities.

Part II of the course will provide hands-on DH training through workshops that will introduce students to a variety of DH tools and platforms, including data visualization, text mining, mapping, annotations, digital archiving, collaborative authoring, film forensics, volumetrics, interactive design, databases, and critical remixing. The workshops will help students acquire a diverse set of skills for analyzing moving images, and will provide them with tools to use in their final projects and other class activities. Final project options include: conceptualizing and designing new analytical tools, creating new platforms for the digital analysis of moving images, using existing DH tools for a new project, critically remixing archival material, contributing content to an existing DH initiative, producing multimedia scholarship (including videographic work), or using an online authoring platform (such as Scalar, Omeka, or StoryMaps) for an academic research paper.

Course assignments will include short response papers (part I of the course), presentations (I & II), software reviews (II), prototype design or project outline (II), and a final project (II). The course is suitable for all levels of technical expertise.

Toby Lee
Thursdays, 9am-12:30pm
Room 635
4 points
Class #23452

Limited Enrollment.  Open only to Cinema Studies MA/PhD or Graduate Film & TV student. Course needs permission code. This course requires an application to the instructor. Please prepare a one page double-spaced statement, which includes the following information: 1) Department where you are enrolled, 2) Student status — degree program & year in program, 3) Why you wish to participate in this seminar, and 4) A summary of any film/video production or studio art experience (for Cinema Studies students only). Please email this statement to tobylee@nyu.edu no later than November 21, 2016.

This theory-practice course is designed to be of interest to graduate students in both the Film & TV and Cinema Studies departments. Through screenings, readings, and class discussion, we explore the history of realism as a theory and its manifestations in filmmaking practice, investigating how different conceptions of, and investments in, the “real” have shaped cinema since its inception -- from early silent cinema, through the golden age of neorealism and art cinema, to the increasingly immersive experiences offered by today’s digital, 3D, and VR technologies. Parallel to this historical and theoretical work, students will also collaborate on GFTV thesis projects that engage with theories and/or practices of realism. CS students will be paired with GFTV students, who will come to the course with projects at various stages of development, and each pair will work together to conduct research and further develop these projects in a workshop setting. In the process, we will explore different relationships between cinema studies/scholarship and film production, both historically and in our own practice.

Ken Dancyger
Thursdays, 6:20-9pm
Room 674
4 points
Class #6730

Genre is all about understanding that there are different pathways each genre presents to the writer. Genres each have differing character and dramatic arcs. In this class students will learn about different genres and using that knowledge will write two different genre treatments of their story idea. This is an intermediate level screenwriting class.

THIS COURSE SECTION IS OPEN ONLY TO CINEMA STUDIES GRADUATE STUDENTS.

Peter Oleksik
Tuesdays, 6-10pm
665 Broadway, Room 643
4 points
Class # 6640

This seminar will increase students' knowledge of primary issues and emerging strategies for the preservation of media works that go beyond single channels/screens. Students will gain practical skills with identification and risk assessment for works as a whole and their component parts, particularly in the areas of audio and visual media and digital, interactive media projects that are stored on fixed media, presented as installations, and existing in networks. Examples of production modes/works to be studied are animations (individual works and motion graphics) web sites, games, interactive multimedia (i.e., educational/artist CDROMs), and technology-dependent art installations. Students will test principles and practices of traditional collection management with these works, such as appraisal, selection, care and handling, risk/condition assessment, "triage", description, and storage and will be actively involved in developing new strategies for their care and preservation. Case studies will be undertaken in collaboration with artists/producers, museums, libraries, and/or archives. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Students outside of the Moving Image Archiving & Preservation (MIAP) MA Program: please email tisch.preservation@nyu.edu to request enrollment permission number.

Dan Streible
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points
Class #6710

The word “curating” differs in meaning in different contexts. This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their acquisition, archiving, preservation, restoration, and reformatting, through their screening, programming, use, re-use, exploitation, translation, and interpretation. This course focuses on the practices of film and video exhibition in museums, archives, cinematheques, festivals, and other venues. It 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 provoke uses of moving image collections. Specific curatorial practices of festivals, symposia, seminars, and projects will be examined in detail. Active participation in class discussion is essential to the success of this seminar, and therefore mandatory.

Much of the course considers the planning, production, and documentation of the 10th Orphan Film Symposium (www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm), the biennial event devoted to screening, studying, and saving neglected moving images. NYU Cinema Studies is organizing the 2016 edition of the symposium with the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Devoted to the theme sound (broadly conceived), “Orphans X” takes place in Culpeper, April 6 - 9. Students are very strongly encouraged to attend all four days and nights of the symposium. Each student will research and complete a curatorial project, with the option to have that project be a contribution to the Orphan Film Symposium. 

All graduate students (and select advanced undergraduates) may take the course.

Howard Besser
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points
Class #6647

This course studies the different kinds of institutions that collect and manage cultural heritage material: museums of art, history and science; libraries, archives, and historical societies; corporate institutions. It compares and contrasts these types of institutions to reveal how they differ from one another. It considers, for example, how different types of institutions may handle similar material in significantly different ways (from what they acquire, to how they describe it, to how they display or preserve it). The course also examines the principles followed by the different professions that work in these institutions (librarians, archivists, curators, conservators). The course examines theories of collecting, and the history and culture of heritage institutions and the professions that work there. It studies their various missions and professional ethics, and the organizational structures of institutions that house cultural heritage (including professional positions and the roles of individual departments). Experts who are professionally concerned with cultural collections will visit the seminar to discuss their organizations and duties, while the class will also visit a variety of local cultural institutions.

The course is required for students in the MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. Other students should write to the instructor for permission at howard@nyu.edu.

Teja Ganti
Tuesdays, 2-4:45pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 102
4 points
Class # 6639

For approved Culture & Media students. Other students must request permission of teacher.

In the last decade, a new field -- the ethnography of media -- has emerged as an exciting new arena of research. While claims about media in people’s lives are made on a daily basis, surprisingly little research has actually attempted to look at how media is part of the naturally occurring lived realities of people's lives. Anthropologists and media scholars interested in film, television, and video have been turning their attention increasingly beyond the text and empiricist notions of audiences (stereotypically associated with the ethnography of media) to consider, ethnographically, the complex social worlds in which media is produced, circulated and consumed, at home and elsewhere. This work theorizes media studies from the point of view of cross-cultural ethnographic realities and anthropology from the perspective of new spaces of communication focusing on the social, economic and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice, whether in production, reception, or circulation. The class will be organized around case studies that interrogate broader issues that are particularly endemic to questions of cross-cultural media including debates over cultural imperialism vs. the autonomy of local producers/consumers, the instability and stratification of reception, the shift from national to transnational circuits of production and consumption, the increasing complicity of researchers with their subjects over representations of culture. These concerns are addressed in a variety of locations, from the complex circulation of films, photos, and lithographs that demonstrate the historically and culturally contingent ways in which images are read and used; to the ever increasing range of televisual culture, from state sponsored melodramas, religious epics and soap operas, to varieties of public television; to the activist use of video, radio, the Internet, and small media. Readings will be selected to address the research interests of students in the class.

Prerequisites: This class assumes scholarly background and other courses in Anthropology and/or Cinema + Media Studies, a serious commitment to the topic, and an expectation that for many students, it will provide an opportunity for starting to develop their thesis research. It is open only to students in the Culture and Media program who have successfully completed Culture and Media 1, or by permission of the instructor.

Permission code required.

Pegi Vail
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10am-12pm
Waverly Place, Room 612
4 points
Class # 6641, 6642  

This is the second part of the year-long video production seminar and concentrates on the production and completion of the independent video projects begun in the fall part of the course. This semester will consist of continued work on the projects and production meetings to present and discuss the works in progress. The course concludes with a public screening of finished projects in early May.

Crosslisted with ANTH-GA 1219.

Permission code required.

CINE-GT 2901
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6644

CINE-GT 2903
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6645

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, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements. The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses. This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project. To register, you must present a signed “Independent Study Form” at the department office when you register. This form must be completely filled out, detailing your independent study project. It must have your faculty sponsor’s signature (whomever you have chosen to work with - this is not necessarily your adviser) indicating their approval.

CINE-GT 2950
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6814

CINE-GT 2952
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6820

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

4 points
Class # 6652

A student wishing to conduct a directed reading 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, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements.  To register, you must present a signed “Independent Study Form” at the department office when you register.  This form must be completely filled out, detailing your independent study project.  It must have your faculty sponsor’s signature indicating their approval.