FILM 180: Film Culture Does not count toward the film studies major or minor. Considers the development of the film industry and the impact of the movies on global popular culture. Multiple times and instructors available, please consult the Master Schedule for details.
FILM 240 Introduction to Film and Media Studies Introduction to the critical study of film and media. Students will closely analyze moving images and develop written arguments about film and media. Class TTh 11:00-12:15 Heidi Cooley Screenings Tu 7:30-930
FILM 300 * * NEW MAJOR COURSE!!! * * Film and Media History Surveys the development of cinema and related media from the 1820s to the present. Attention to the relations among key technological, cultural, and industrial changes, their causes, and consequences.
Section 001
Class MW 12:20-1:35 Mark Cooper
Screenings Tu 5:00-7:30
Section 002
Class MW 4:00-5:15 Mark Cooper
Screenings Tu 5:00-7:30
FILM 473/ENGL 473 Film and Media Theory and Criticism
Encountering moving images of all sizes, in public and in private, in fixed locations and even as we walk and drive, we live in an increasingly screen-saturated culture. To help us understand it, film and media theory and criticism provide a diverse body of modern thought as well as a rich repertoire of analytical tools. Informed by a wide range of intellectual traditions—semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical race studies, and more—theories of film and media often serve as lightning rods for addressing central questions about modern and postmodern life. We’ll analyze a selection of such writings from 1910 to the present to consider what screen culture is and has been, and what people have imagined it could be. We’ll also read pertinent films and media texts through the lenses offered by the critical writings, and use those moving images to reflect upon, complicate, and refine our ways of thinking about screen culture. Class MW 2:30-3:45 Susan Courtney Screenings M 4:00-6:30
FILM 510 Music and the Hollywood Film
Music has always been an essential part of film. Even before films had words, they had music. This course considers the relationship film has had with music over its 100 year history, focusing on aesthetic assumptions and conventions in the marriage of images and music and how those have changed over time. Issues include the transition to sound (1926-1935); the musical and the emergence of the background score; the classical Hollywood score (1935-1960); changes and innovations from 1960-1977 in the instrumentation (atonality, serialism, jazz, rock, electronic music), authorship, and marketing of film music; and trends since 1977 including the rebirth of the orchestral score, the synthesizer, influence of music videos and video games, and increasingly blurred distinctions between sound design and music composition. Class TTh 9:30-10:45 Julie Hubbert
Screenings W 5:00-7:30
FILM 566P/ENGL 566P/WOST 403/WOST 796 Contemporary Masculinities
How is masculinity represented in contemporary film? This course examines films that celebrate and critique conventional (or “normative”) manhood—e.g., films that embrace a masculinity committed to power, privilege, and violence, and films that challenge or imagine alternatives to it. We’ll consider how the category of masculinity interacts with “femininity,” (queer) sexuality, whiteness and racial “otherness,” national and transnational identities. We’ll explore how film genres help produce, and subvert, particular kinds of manhood. We’ll examine how filmic representations of gender can negotiate contemporary history. And we’ll consider psychologies of male violence. Screenings include relatively “offbeat” American films and some international titles.
Class TTh 12:30-1:45 Greg Forter Screenings M 7:30-9:30
Film 597M/Arab 580/Comp Lit 597 Arab Film and Video
An overview of Arab film with concentration on Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. Studies Arab films from different genres, national backgrounds, and time periods, looking at them from the angles of form and content, “text” and “context,” and cinema tradition. The course delineates the historical, social, political, and cultural conditions under which the films were written, produced, exhibited and received, and understands these visual productions as enunciating various discourses of historical, political, and social relevance—both in their local and regional contexts. In studying these discourses, we will understand how films create, reinforce, and/or challenge dominant discourses of class, sexuality, gender, colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. Class MW 10:00-11:15 Stephen Sheehi
Screenings M 5:00-7:30 Satisfies Cultural Awareness Requirement
FILM598C/CHIN398F
Screening China: Cinema and the Nation Since its arrival in China in 1896, cinema has been a space in which artists showcase competing visions of the nation. How have those visions changed in differing political climates? How has gender affected the portrayal of political issues on screen? How has an increasingly globalized world affected the narratives filmmakers present when dealing with China and its history? We’ll consider these questions as we view films from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Film genre and cinematic history will be two key organizing factors in the class, as we view melodramas from the “golden age” of Chinese cinema, revolutionary films, Hong Kong martial arts films, Fifth-Generation responses to Maoist history, and Taiwanese art cinema. Class MW 1:00-2:15 Krista Van Fleit Hang Screenings W 5:00-7:00 Satisfies Cultural Awareness Requirement
MART 490V Vision, Visuality, and the Logics of Visual Media Culture Introduction to the critical study of visual media culture and its artifacts and technologies. Students will learn to interrogate the nature, histories, and power of the visual, including the logics underpinning social-cultural assumptions regarding vision and visual practices. Class TTH 2:00-3:15 Heidi Cooley
Other Film/Media Courses
ANTH 291F East Asian Popular Culture
Popular culture in East Asia, including mass media such as film, music, television programming, Japanese manga, and other related topics. The course will include theoretical examinations of cultural hybridity, colonial pasts, alternate modernities, local vs. transnational space, and the adoption and adaptation of foreign influences. Class MW 2:00-3:15 Marc Moskowitz Screenings F 3:30-5:0
FRENCH 397
The Colonial Experience in French and Francophone Film
A thematic approach to French and Francophone films dealing with France’s colonial history in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Indochina. Also treats some aspects of Belgian colonialism in Central Africa, as well as the legacy of those colonial histories in the immigrant communities of Paris and Brusels. Considers the films within the contexts of both film history and colonial history. Taught in English; films are subtitled. Class M 2:30-5:00 Jeanne Garane Screenings W 2:30-3:30
HIST 449 Cultural History in Modern America
An overview of major developments in American Culture. As “culture” is a complex and contested term, the course probes various meanings of the word, while questioning how historians have developed many, often competing, definitions of American culture. We’ll examine cultural values, symbols, and images, while chronicling media that disseminate cultural ideologies. With attention to how culture both influences and is affected by broad social and political currents in US History, the course probes questions like: How has the concept of leisure changed? How has racial and ethnic imagery changed over the course of the 20th Century? How has technology shaped the meaning of politics, war, and social movements? Our focus will be on the analysis of texts (primary and secondary). Students will strongly benefit from a previous History course, particularly HIST 112. Class TTH 11:00-12:15 Lauren Sklaroff
Span 380A Hispanic Film and Culture
Approaching the study of Spain's modern culture through film, explores films by Buñuel, Saura, Erice, Almodóvar, Amenábar and others. Taught in Spanish (requires a min. 300-level proficiency in Spanish). Class TTH 12:30-1:45 Maria Mabrey
Graduate Courses/ Spring 2009
NOTE: 500-level courses above can be taken for graduate credit. (E.g., FILM 510, 566P, 597M, 598C)
HIST 700 Cultural History in America
A graduate-level introduction to the historical literature and major historiographical debates in U.S. Cultural History. For more information, email the instructor: sklaroff@gwm.sc.edu Class TTH 2:00-4:30 Lauren Sklaroff
