Spring 2016 Graduate Courses

Toby Lee
Thursdays, 6-10pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 7067

This foundational course engages a number of cultural, aesthetic, and methodological issues in current historical film scholarship: the constitution of the codes and institutions of cinema, and the ways in which the history of film has been, and has been understood to be, embedded in, shaped, and constrained by material and social practices. We look at a range of periods and significant moments in film history, characterized by exemplary films, historical documents and historiographical debates. The aim of this course is for you to become familiar not only with particular film histories, but with what it means to make film history. To that end, we will sample and survey various approaches to film historiography and consider their underlying theoretical assumptions and methodological operations. The course will chiefly involve critical discussion of exemplary studies in film history along with careful scrutiny of films.

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

Marina Hassapopoulou
Mondays, 6-10pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 7068

This course closely examines a variety of theoretical writings concerned with aesthetic, social and psychological aspects of the 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" associations. Students study the writing of both classical theorists such as Eisenstein and Bazin and contemporary thinkers such as Metz, Dyer, and Jenkins. Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship with other forms of cultural expression to the way in which cinema shapes our conception of racial and gender identity.

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

Dana Polan
Thursdays, 9am-12pm
Room 635
4 points
Class # 7083

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 oral exam in May 2016. The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion.

COURSE OPEN TO PHD STUDENTS ONLY.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 20380
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 20381

This interdisciplinary course will investigate the relations between experimental film, radio, music, and sound art in modernism and postmodernism. The inventions of photography, cinema and sound recording radically altered the 19th century consciousness of perception, temporality, selfhood, and death. The newfound role of the voice — depersonalized, disembodied, eternalized — appeared in poetic and literary phantasms of that epoch, and offered models of future (and futuristic) art forms. This course will study the aesthetic and ideological effects of this epochal shift, especially as it concerns the subsequent practice of avant-garde art and aesthetics. It will specifically focus on the recontextualization of the history of avant garde film in the broader context of the sound arts and their discursive practices, from Dada and Surrealism through Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus and the American Independent Cinema. Special attention will be paid to the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, the moment when the arts moved toward a more performative mode, entailing the dematerialization and decommodification of the aesthetic domain.

Course not open to undergraduates.

Cross-listed with PERF-GT 2505.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 20679
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 20680

This course traces the origins of Chinese cinema and its transformation and diversification into a multi-faceted, polycentric trans-regional phenomenon in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan up to the 1960s. We study a number of film cultures in Shanghai/China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including the complex web of their historical kinship ties, and place them within the regional and global contexts of modernity, revolution, nation-building, and attendant socio-cultural transformations. To investigate these unique yet interrelated film cultures together raises the question of national cinema as a unitary object of study, while suggesting new avenues for analyzing the complex genealogy of a cluster of urban, regional, commercial or state-sponsored film industries within a larger comparative and transnational framework. Topics related to screenings and discussions include urban modernity, exhibition and spectatorship, transition to sound, stardom and propaganda, gender and ethnic identities, and genre formation and hybridization.

David Bagnall
Mondays, 6:20-9pm
Room 108
4 points
Class # 7069

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.

David Forgacs
Mondays, 3:30-6:10pm
Casa Italiana Library
4 points
Class # TBA

Non-fiction films have been made in Italy since the earliest years of cinema, yet overall they remain less well known than some of those made in North America, Latin America and other parts of Europe. This is surprising if one considers the cult status among cinephiles of Italian documentarists like Vittorio De Seta and Alberto Grifi and the fact that many major Italian directors of features, from Antonioni and Bertolucci to Pasolini and Visconti, all made non-fiction films too. The aims of this course are (i) to familiarize students with a cross-section of Italian non-fiction film in its various forms: instructional, industrial, newsreel, propaganda, ethnographic, social, memoir, found-footage, etc.; (ii) to equip them to engage critically with these films through close analysis and reading of some key texts on documentary; (iii) to help them to produce high-level critical writing about Italian documentary. The course will consist of weekly readings, viewings and seminars and it will be graded on the basis of class participation and discussion, regular assignments and a final paper. Some non-Italian films will be viewed too, either whole or in part, for comparison and context. Students will be invited to make by the end of the course a video project (not formally graded) to complement their written paper. A knowledge of Italian will be an asset, but all the core films will either have English subtitles or an accompanying written translation or summary and all required readings will be in English. ITAL-GT 1986 is course sponsor.

Toby Lee
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 7074
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 7278

In this course, we examine the history of documentary form as political discourse and practice. We take as a starting point documentary theorist Michael Renov’s discussion of poetics -- which he defines as the rigorous investigation of aesthetic forms, their composition and function -- in the context of the documentary image. While Renov argues that “poetics must also confront the problematics of power,” so too must an understanding of political documentary take seriously questions of poetics and form. Through close readings of particular films and careful study of their formal strategies and aesthetic choices, we explore how documentary images act, or how they are made to act, within larger structures of power and resistance. We will look at films from a wide range of periods, places and styles --
including observational, experimental, compilation/appropriation, performative, propaganda, and essay films -- considering these works in relation to a variety of topics including social and political activism, revolutionary movements, state violence, surveillance, sexual politics, colonialism and anti-colonialism, human rights, labor, and the shifting politics of the image in the digital age.

JungBong Choi
Tuesdays, 6-10pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 22015
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 22017

This class surveys major concepts and issues concerning media and popular cultures in Asia along with the region’s geocultural and sociopolitical environments. It investigates the assumed distinctiveness of Asian media systems in conjunction with the macro theoretical questions of regionalism, Asian modernity, cultural hegemony and postcoloniality. There are three sections in this class: the first part examines a range of media/cultural texts and practices as an effort to locate conceptual frameworks befitting the regional particularities; the second part assays the political economy of media institutions following the end of Cold war and intensification of globalization; the last part looks into the latest development of mobile digital media in relation to the changing dynamics of producing, distributing and participating in inter/regional popular cultures. While adopting methodological transnationalism in the place of national frameworks, it will focus geographically on East Asia with due attention to both South East Asia.

Sid Gottlieb
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 22012
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 22013

This course will focus on representative films from all stages of Hitchcock’s career as a director, including his work in the silent era, his sextet of thrillers in the 1930s, his early films in Hollywood, and the films of his "major phase" in the 1950s and ‘60s, including his television work. I’ll try to balance new looks at some of his films that everyone has probably seen (e.g., The 39 Steps, Vertigo, Psycho) with what may be first looks at some of his films that have been overlooked or under-appreciated (e.g., The Pleasure Garden, I Confess, The Wrong Man). Recurrent topics of discussion will include Hitchcock’s visual style; analysis and presentation of human weakness, wickedness, and sexuality as well as his critical examination of social institutions and political issues; representations of women; and reflections on the act of watching and the art of cinema. We will also examine Hitchcock’s place in film history, discussing films he was influenced by and those he influenced, and his role in critical history. Each class will include an introductory lecture, film screening, and discussion. Required work will include regular reading assignments and writing at least one short (5 pp.) and one long (12-15 pp.) critical essay.

Sid Gottlieb is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut, where he teaches courses in film, television, and critical approaches to media. He has a particular interest in Alfred Hitchcock, has edited collections of Hitchcock's writings and interviews, and also co-edits the Hitchcock Annual with Richard Allen.

Bill Simon
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 20664
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 20665

This seminar will investigate the narrative conception and dynamics of Jean Renoir’s films with two major points of emphasis: 1.Their continuity with the visual culture of France of the 19th century (suggested by the fact that his father was a great painter in the Impressionist tradition); and 2. The development of Renoir’s narrational style (especially the use of long takes) in relation to social, cultural, and political discourses of the period in which he was working. This seminar will concentrate on the Popular Front films of the 1930s, but will also consider shifts in the styles and contexts of the films during his American and Post-World War II periods. Class presentations, papers, readings required.

Allen S. Weiss
Wednesdays, 3:30-6:15pm
Room 611
4 points
Class # 20634

Limited Enrollment. 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. Background in theory and background (both practical and intellectual) in curating, 4. How you see this course fitting into your own intellectual project(s). Please email this statement to allen.weiss@nyu.edu no later than December 1, 2015. Email allen.weiss@nyu.edu.

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.

Cross-listed with PERF-GT 2214.

Permission code required.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 22018
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 22019

This seminar analyzes representations of the body in a variety of discourses. It examines the operation of explicit imagery within a complex web of attitudes and cultural practices, such as ideologies of gender and the privatization of sex, that covertly and overtly influence viewer-text/body interactions. Critical scholarship on the history and science of sex(ual construction) is utilized to investigate topics such as sexological imperatives, proliferation of deviance, the medicalized interior, phantom pain, body identity disorder, body modification, erotic imagination, and the production of desire and blame in advertising and reality television. We will read such authors as Michel Foucault, Jennifer Terry, Siobhan Somerville, Annemarie Mol, Geertje Mak, Vivian Sobchack, Elaine Scarry, Caroline Bynum, Robert Stoller, Judith Butler, and Linda Williams. Drawing on disability studies and transgender studies, one focus for this semester will be the body contour as a site of difference. We will consider how the film and video texts (many experimental, such as Destricted, Near the Big Chakra, Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,The Body Beautiful, Materialaktionsfilme, Chop Off, Stigmata, Sick: Bob Flanagan, [P]lain Truth) contribute to and/or resist dominant regulatory schemes.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 20376
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 20377

This course will critically explore interactive digital works that focus on individual and collective rewritings and negotiations of shared histories, including the emerging practice of i-docs (interactive documentaries). The class will interact with works that employ interactivity in order to interrogate the varying relationships between the personal, the historical, and the fictional. We will analyze interactive media that make audiences reflective of the very tools that construct, selectively archive, and universalize shared histories. Such projects include SelfieCity (Lev Manovich, 2014), !Women Art Revolution (Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2010), RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Gaylor, 2009), Terminal
Time (Mateas et al., 1999), and live virtual reality projects from guest artists. The class will also explore how a film’s performative aspects –including audience interaction– enhance its potential to present a compelling argument for historical mythmaking as an integral part of history.

Furthermore, students will analyze the ways in which contemporary subjectivity is shaped by mnemotechnical prostheses (external, memory-assisting devices) amplified by interactive media by exploring digital films such as Jonathan Caouette’s iMovie Tarnation (2003), and standardized interfaces/ platforms that narrativize memory and guide the public authoring of the self (such as the Facebook timeline).

Selected readings: Russell Kilbourn – Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature & Film, Alison Landsberg – Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Robert A. Rosenstone – History on Film/Film on History, and The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary – Alisa Lebow (ed).

Mona Jimenez
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
665 Broadway, Room 643
4 points
Class # 7071

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.

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 mona.jimenez@nyu.edu

Dan Streible
Tuesday, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 7150

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. 

Howard Besser
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 611
4 points
Class # 7079

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.

Faye Ginsburg
Tuesdays, 6-9pm
Kriser Room TBA
4 points
Class # 7070

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.

Noelle Stout
Tuesdays, 11am-1:45pm
Waverly Place, Room 612
4 points
Class # 7072

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.

Ken Dancyger
Thursdays, 6:20-9pm
Room 674
4 points
Class # 7176

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.

CINE-GT 2901
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 7075

CINE-GT 2903
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 7076

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 # 17990

CINE-GT 2952
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 20375

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 # 7084

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.