Spring 2018 Graduate Courses

Feng-Mei Heberer
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 22719

This M.A. core course examines the background, context, and history of broadcasting. Its approach is comparative, with a focus on television as cultural, social, and aesthetic formation in and beyond the US. Topics include histories of technology, economics of media institutions, labor politics, audiences and reception, and questions of representation. We will also pay particular attention to method and modes of historiography.

This course is open only to 1st year Cinema Studies M.A. students.

Marina Hassapopoulou
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
4 points
Class # 6855

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.

Robert Stam
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm
Room 635
4 points
Class # 6869

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.   The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion.

This course is open only to Cinema Studies Ph.D. students.

Allen Weiss
Tuesdays, 1:00-5:00pm
Room 674
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23640
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23641

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.

Robert Stam
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 648
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23487
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23488

This course offers an historical and critical overview of one of the most dynamic and influential film movements within the history of the cinema -- the French New Wave – a movement that has influenced filmmakers all over the world. After examining the philosophical underpinnings of the movement in philosophical existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir) and the theoretical underpinnings in the film criticism of Cahiers du Cinema, we will examine key films and directors. We will explore the three core groups that together formed the New Wave, notably 1) the Cahiers directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer); 2) the Left Bank directors (Resnais, Duras, Varda, Marker); and 3) Cinema Verite (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin). While we will focus largely on the films themselves, we will situate New Wave films within a broader spectrum of philosophy, literature, and the art. Some key themes in the course will be: first-person auteur cinema; artistic modernism and the New Wave; the relation between film and the other arts; the revolution in film language; the filmic adaptation of novels; and feminism and the New Wave; race, gender and sexuality; the evolution of style; and the political evolution leading up to the near-revolution of May 1968.

The course will approach the New Wave through 1) critical writing, including by the directors themselves; 2) the screening of a chronologically arranged series of feature films; and 3) the analysis of short clips related to the larger themes. The goal of the course is for students to gain an overall sense of the historical importance of the New Wave, of the characteristic styles and themes of the key directors, and of some of the theories that circulated around such films.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 6861
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 6893

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.

Dana Polan
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23637
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23638

For critics and fans, 1939 is a year that crystallized the cultural and even artistic potential of the Hollywood studio system:  this, after all, was the year of such revered works as GONE WITH THE WIND, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, STAGECOACH, THE WIZARD OF OZ, among others.  Intending to avoid any notion of special genius or historical accident or such-like, this course sets out to account for Hollywood achievement in concrete material, industrial, and social terms:  what was the Hollywood system and what sorts of films did it produce and how and to what effect?  We will look at studio structure and its operations, institutional support and pressure (for example, the role of censorship and regulation), the role of critics, audience taste, and so on.  While we will draw on important secondary studies, much of the reading will be drawn from texts of the time in order to garner as immediate and vivid a picture of the functioning of the Hollywood system at a moment often assumed to represent its pinnacles of achievement.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 7098
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 7099

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.

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

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 22715
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 22716

This course maps the emerging interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies, which concerns the history and culture of transgender, transsexual, and non-binary people. From 19^th century (and ongoing) sexology, to 1950s (and ongoing) genital “corrections” of intersex infants, to the 1969 Stonewall (and ongoing) rebellions for gay/lesbian liberation, to the 1970s (and ongoing) Michigan Women’s Music Festival, the history of transgenderism has intersected lesbian, gay, bi, intersexual, and feminist histories in complicated ways.  The phrase “a woman in a man’s body” initially typed homosexuals but later typed transsexuals. Genital surgeries forced on intersexuals were denied to transsexuals.  Internal and lateral oppression challenges coalitions against oppression. Throughout this complex history, transgender activists, artists, lawyers, health workers, celebrities, scholars, etc. have produced an immense body of knowledge and vibrant culture.

Transgender Studies addresses such topics as Cross Cultural Gender Diversity, Trans Color and Class, Personal Narrative, Transphobia and Violence, Medical Pathologizing, Penalizing Sex, Species Synaesthesia, and Body Technologies. We will read work by scholars such as Susan Stryker, David Valentine, Jacob Hale, Sandy Stone, Steven Whittle, Talia Bettcher, Joanne Meyerowitz, Paisley Currah, Riki Wilchins, Jay Prosser, Dean Spade, and Eva Hayward. The course will place a special emphasis on Trans Art, especially photography, performance, and cinema. We will view mainstream and independent films, such as Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Boys Don’t Cry, Screaming Queens, Cruel and Unusual, The Salt Mines, Beautiful Boxer, and The Danish Girl. The course will be conducted in a workshop style to accommodate the special interests among students with varying expertise.

Allen Weiss
Wednesdays, 3:50-6:35pm
Room 611
4 points
Class # 22717

With the recent publication of thousands of pages of Artaud's private journal — written during his incarceration at the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and afterwards in Paris during the final and perhaps most creative years of his life — as well as with several exhibitions of his drawings, a vast reassessment of his life work is underway, calling into question many previous readings of his most influential work, The Theater and Its Double.

This seminar will consider all aspects of Artaud's production — theory, theater, poetry, cinema, radio, performance, drawings, letters — following the conviction that the early, more famous work must be reinterpreted, as he himself suggests, in the light of his ultimate, often hermetic and incendiary, artistic efforts. Furthermore, as Artaud's work spanned precisely the decades of the modernist discovery of the art of the insane —from Hans Prinzhorn's 1922 publication of Artistry of the Mentally Ill through Jean Dubuffet's postwar formulation of the notion of "art brut" —Artaud's work will be contextualized within the modern history of the psychopathology of expression.

Limited Enrollment. Cross-listed with PERF-GT 2217.

Zhen Zhang
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23485
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23486

The new Chinese documentary as an independent film practice emerged around 1989.  Prior to that, documentary film in China was exclusively produced and distributed within a state-controlled media system.  Paralleling and bearing witness to nearly three decades of rapid and large-scale economic and social transformations in China, the new documentary has also transformed itself into a multifaceted social movement involving filmmakers, critics, curators, and publics on a variety of platforms including the internet, and has caught the attention of both domestic and international film and arts festivals.  The seminar proceeds along two axes of investigation: to trace a historical trajectory of the movement and to explore conceptual frameworks for understanding the dynamic relationships between aesthetic experimentations, socio-political exigencies and ethical responsibilities in the Chinese independent documentary.  Placing the evolving phenomenon in the Mainland within a broader Sinophone context and regional globalization, the course will bring in parallels or examples in Taiwan, analyzing their connections and divergences. An integral aspect of the course will inquire into issues of technology, distribution, exhibition and reception. (Students are welcome to conduct comparative research on Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora.)

Laura Harris
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
4 points

Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class # 23653
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class # 23654

For this course, we will view moving pictures, as a theoretical exploration of the question of bodies and their movement in the context of the industrial revolution, when moving pictures were invented, and in the broader context of modern racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.  What is the movement of bodies understood to mean?  How is the movement of bodies—both on and in front of the screen—shaped by cinematography, editing and special effects, and other film practices and to what end?  The films we will examine will both cinematically represent and bodies in motion and offer reflection on the various ways film participates in producing or regulating that motion.  We’ll look at the tension, in these films, between the movement of the body at work and the movement of the body in dance, the breakdown of the individuated figure in the blur between the individual figure and the collective or the surrounds, and between bodies on screen, and their viewers.  What way of life does the movement of bodies in these moving pictures produce or seek?  We will draw on theories of movement from film studies, but also performance studies and social theory in order to think through these questions.

Toby Lee
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:30pm
Room 635
4 points
Class # 23896

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 13, 2017.

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, CS and GFTV students will collaborate on media projects that engage with theories and/or practices of realism. Students from both departments may come to the course with projects at various stages of development, and will work in groups to conduct research and further develop some of 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
Mondays, 5:20-8:00pm
Room 670
4 points
Class # 6943

Genre is all about understanding that there are different pathways each genre presents to the writer. Genres each have differing character and dramatic arcs. 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. 

CINE-GT 2901
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6862

CINE-GT 2903
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 6863

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 # 7013

CINE-GT 2952
1-4 points (variable)
Class # 7018

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 # 6870

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.

Faye Ginsburg
Tuesdays, 5:00-7:45pm
25 Waverly Place, 1st Floor Conference Room
4 points
Class # 6857

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

In the last two decades, 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.

SEMINAR: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:45pm
LAB: Thursdays, 10:00am-12:00pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 612
4 points
Class # 6860

For approved Culture & Media Students only. Permission code required.  

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]

Dan Streible
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
4 points
Class $ 6924

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.

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Howard Besser
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
4 points
Class # 6865

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.

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Marco Williams
Mondays, 6:20-9:00pm
Room 108
4 points
Class # 6856

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
Thursdays, 3:30-6:10pm
Casa Library
4 points
Class # 20547

This graduate-level course investigates the relationship between the media and technologies of film and video, on the one hand, and city space on the other, with particular reference to Italian cities.  What happens when the static or mobile camera meets the built environment, when it moves in, around or above buildings, when editing cuts and splices the city into “views”, when the flat rectangular screen frames three-dimensional space? How do films harness urban space to their narrative projects? How do they draw on and reorganize the pre-existing historical and social meanings of urban places? How are different elements of the urban environment photographed and manipulated? How does sound interact with images in films and video about urban space? In what ways can film and video serve as documents of urban space or act as agents of change in debates about uses of the city? Analysis of the films will be supported by reading on space in cinema and on Italian cities. As well as looking at physical space we will pay attention to social space (e.g. centre versus periphery, commercial versus residential districts, space constructed by individuals through movement and activity) and to historical stratifications and changes within filmed cities (traces of the past, rebuilding, new developments).

CINEMA STUDIES MA/PHD only.

Alina Marazzi
Mondays & Wednesdays, 2:00-3:15pm
Room TBA
4 points
Class # TBA

NOTE: This is a 2 credit course, starting in March. You will receive more information via email once it is online.

Led by award-winning Italian filmmaker Alina Marazzi, this course focuses on the use of archival footage – both home movies and institutional – taking examples for close analysis from her own films and theatre work. How do images from the past define our memories, both private and public? How do we look at archival footage from the past? Do those images always portray “reality”? How far do our emotional reactions to documentary film images from the past shape our perception of private and public memories? These are some of the questions which will be addressed to during the course. The course aims to encourage students to do research in private film archives (home movies and non-official archives). As a final project students will be able either to (a) develop and make a short montage film, or (b) write a script for such a film, or (c) write a paper of 10-15 pages on the topic of reusing private home movies.

Laurence Rickels
Thursdays, 12:30-3:10pm
Room TBA
4 points
Class # 23562

Sponsor GERM-GA 2912. This section open only to Cinema Studies MA/PhD.

When J. R. R. Tolkien christened his new or renewed genre of choice “Fantasy,” he knew he was founding it in proximity to wish power. To block the narcissism of chaos resulting from a genre of daydreaming, Tolkien grounded the fantasy genre in the one fantasy that is true, the Gospel, and the other worlds of fairy in the prospect of Christian redemption. Philip K. Dick argued that the reader checked in and out of fantasy worlds whereas in science fiction every fictional reality the reader encountered remained a possible or alternate reality that could never be withdrawn. While the science fiction genre projected many realities that came true, in another area of fulfilment the genre piled up a ruinscape of misses and near-misses. The trauma of realization of prediction that beset science fiction during the Third Reich also meant that its psychotic sublime innovations never really left the range of the WWII origin of computing. But in addition to rocket science and artificial doubling of intelligent life, the computer held the digital relation in store.

According to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of modern allegory as the new legibility of defunct metaphysical systems, Christianity supplied the ruins for reading by falling short of delivery of its purchase on the future. The fantasy that is true is not Christianity (as Tolkien advertised) but instead the digital relation. This is why the fantasy genre has been in the ascendant within a mix of B-genres since the 1970s. By proximity and default, fantasy has come to represent our second nature as day-dreamers. We begin to understand how Star Wars became our oldest cultural memory.

Time to remember that it was the wish (der Wunsch) and not desire that was Freud’s cornerstone concept. His main philosophical precursor in this lineage of the wish was Arthur Schopenhauer, who speculated on a difference between our daily sense organ and the “dream organ,” our portal at night to liminal occult experience. Dreaming something as true, wahrträumen, draws from the will, the Ding an sich, but commences entertaining occult experience (like clairvoyance) upon reaching waking consciousness and translating what was drawn from the deep well of the will into the spatial/temporal/causal coordinates of wahrnehmen, perceiving, literally taking something as true. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud represented the sliding scale of the impact of the will through the wish power manifested in dreams. Freud brought his basic concept full circle as intrapsychic allegory when he skipped the night and approached waking fantasy or the daydream. In “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” Freud argued that while every wish fantasy binds the idealized past to the future of fulfilment in circumvention of the present, the trigger of the fantasying is stamped as Zeitmarke (date mark) upon the fantasy as a whole. The date mark identifies the expiration of the flight of fantasy by its backfire: historicization, the topical application of allegory.