FLM 200 | MSU Film Collective | Professor Swarnavel Pillai
Thursday, 7:00pm, B122 Wells
This one-credit screening course is available to Film Studies students. Regular attendance and participation is required throughout the semester.
FLM 211 | Documentary History and Theory | Professor Alexandra Hidalgo
Tuesday 9:10–12:00; Thursday 9:10–11:00
From early cinema actualities to contemporary television and film, documentary film structure has had a deep influence on both cinema and on culture. This class explores documentary as a formal structure of societal critique and question, one that allows the viewer a glimpse into the lives and situations that we live in. We will look at the the historical trajectory of the genre, considering along the way the methods of distribution and reception of the films studied. Along the way, we will consider the relationship between the directors and the subject, as this is an often troubled and complex relationship that is often set aside when reviewed for public distribution. Coursework will include written analysis of films, weekly screenings, and in class discussion.
FLM 230 | Introduction to Film | Lokeilani Kaimana
Monday 12:40-3:30, Wednesday 12:40-2:30, Friday 50 min. (varies by section)
This course introduces core concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial œuvres. The coursework covers a wide range of styles and historical periods in order to assess the multitude of possible film techniques (camera techniques, editing, shot selection, etc.) and principles of narrative structuring. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Success in the course demands rigorous attention to both the films and the readings and requires students to watch, analyze, and write about film in new ways. Throughout the semester, students will learn different methods of viewing, analysis, exposition, and criticism and will have the opportunity to write extensively about the films seen in class. Films discussed include works by Brakhage, Burnett, Deren, Griffith, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Sembene, Sternberg, and Welles.
FLM 260.001 | Introduction to Digital Film and Media | Professor Carleen L. Hsu
Tuesday 4:10-7:00, Thursday 4:10–6:00
Cameras do not make films: filmmakers make films…The most important equipment is yourself, your mobile body, your imaginative mind and your freedom to use both. — Maya Daren
Filmmaking is the most powerful form of communication ever invented by humankind. With a focused eye and a keen understanding of storytelling, filmmakers can inform, influence, entertain, and even inspire. This introductory hybrid course is intended to launch students on a journey of exploration into the world of the independent filmmaker and in the process begin the odyssey of becoming one. Students will learn basic technical skills and produce original short visual projects, which will be written, photographed, and edited themselves. Together we will also screen a variety of narrative, non-fiction, and experimental works. And we will engage in robust discussion and critical analysis in an effort to understand how film affects the audience and why.
Professor of Practice Carleen L. Hsu is a two-time Peabody Award winning filmmaker who has produced documentaries for HBO and the PBS series FRONTLINE.
FLM 260.002 | Introduction to Digital Film and Media | Pete Johnston
Tuesday, Thursday 10:10–12:00
This course introduces students to significant discourses surrounding cinema and the digital. Scholars have been divided on the way they look at digital technology/ aesthetics and its implications for the cinema. This course while offering a brief overview of the discourse surrounding the transition of the cinema to digital video/media, which varies in its tone from the skeptical to the euphoric, focuses on practice by encouraging students to explore the poetics of cinema though their low-end technology driven projects. The emphasis will on exploring the possibilities offered by digital technology and new media, and working on projects in the category of fiction, non-fiction, and the rarer genre of the experimental. Towards this end, students in this class will be encouraged to experiment with autobiography, biography, video essay, video diary, travelogue etc.
FLM 300 | History of Film to Midcentury | Professor Joshua Yumibe
Monday 9:10–12:00, Wednesday 9:10–11:00
This course surveys the history of cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Moving chronologically, we will track a variety of national schools and international trends of filmmaking in order to analyze the global development of film exhibition practices, the emergence of film audiences, and more broadly cinema’s role within the public sphere. We will examine the formal, industrial, and cultural changes of the medium from cinema’s emergence through the conversion to sound in the late 1920s. We will also explore the variety of national and international movements form the 1930s to the 1940s—including German and French cinemas, classical Hollywood cinema, and Japanese studio productions pre- and postwar. Through taking a broad and comparative approach to the history of cinema, we will gain critical perspective on the forces that shape the medium’s profoundly transnational character. To assist in this process, we will engage with a variety of primary and secondary textual sources in order to assess and cultivate theoretical methods for researching and writing film history.
FLM 334 | Screenwriting | Professor Bill Vincent
Monday, Wednesday 7:00–8:50
Screenwriting. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Well, it can be, but mostly it’s learning proper formatting, plot structure, characterization, good dialogue. Weekly workshops, ten to fifteen pages per week. Yes, hard work. But by December you will have a full-length script and you will know that you can do it.
FLM 335 | Film Directing | Professor Jeff Wray
Tuesday 12:40–3:30, Thursday 12:40–2:30
Part of the Fiction Film Specialization, Film Directing immerses students in the job of the director through a combination of film screenings and production projects. By studying the works of great directors, and working through a series of filmmaking projects which culminates in the creation of a 3-minute short, students learn first hand the challenges and triumphs of Film Directing. See examples of previous student work.
FLM 355 | Studies in Film Genres: What Does a Genre Look Like? (North and South) | Professor Ken Harrow
Tuesday, 4:10–7:00, Thursday 4:10–6:00
Genres are basically conventional structures that have developed with the growth of cinema into recognizable types or movements. Within mainstream cinema, dominated by Hollywood, we might expect to see crime or detective films, like film noir, or musicals on a grand scale, or intimate social dramas. Each epoch develops its own dominant forms, and we might expect films dealing with terrorism to evolve into a genre for our times. But we can also see how films from other regions might work within “established” genres, accented in their own ways. Or they might develop new genres, such as Third Cinema that accompanied the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, or child soldier films for our times. This course will look at a series of genres, often with counterparts in the Global North and Global South, and compare them with the view of understand how genre is inflected by the regions in which they have developed, and how they might reflect something of the perspectives of the different “worlds” to which they belong.
FLM 380 | Classical Film and Media Theory | Professor Ellen McCallum
Monday, 4:10-7:00, Wednesday 4:10-6:00
Film theory examines how cinema uses all the means at its disposal–including images, sound, words, and narrative–to engage us emotionally and phenomenologically. Film theory takes up fundamental questions about representation in cinema, including what film is, how it represents, how it innovates aesthetically and evolves different styles. Film theory is concerned with individual films as well as how the cinema works as a system that has social, political, and cultural significance. Film theory also considers how movies fit into a broader context of media, art, and storytelling. As a mode of intellectual inquiry, this course in film theory builds upon the skills for analyzing film that you learned in English 230, but pushes you to refine and complicate how you watch films, even as some of the texts we will consider push the limits of filmmaking or of thinking about film. This course draws on the work of key film theorists from the first part of the twentieth century; our primary focus will be on film, although the role of other media—particularly theatre and photography—will come into play.
FLM 435A | Creating the Fiction Film I | Professors Jeff Wray
Monday, Wednesday 12:40-2:30
The capstone class of the Fiction Film Specialization tasks students with writing, producing, finishing and distributing a short film over two semesters. In the first semester, students must form a production team, create and polish a short script, and move through the processes of pre-production and principle photography–no small feat. The professors are there to act as guidance and councel, but make no mistake: students are truly thrust into the independent filmmaking world. Past productions have gone on to screen and win awards at film festivals in Michigan and beyond.
FLM 451 | Studies in Postcolonial Cinema: Popular Hindi Cinema | Professor Swarnavel Pillai
Tuesday 4:10–7:00, Thursday 4:10–6:00
This course offers a critical overview of one of the world’s largest and most beloved film industries—the popular cinema produced mostly in Bombay (Mumbai) and consumed around the world often under the label “Bollywood.” Focusing on the post-Independence (1947) era to the present, it introduces key films, directors, stars, genres, formal techniques, and themes, as well as critical analyses of these and other topics. Special attention will be given to the pervasive role of music, song, and dance. Other topics to be addressed include: the cultural sources of Hindi cinema, cinema and nationalism, the star system, and global audiences. This course assumes no
previous knowledge of Indian culture or cinema, and all films have English subtitles.
On Tuesdays, there will be screenings of carefully chosen films representative of the long and vibrant history of the Hindi cinema, and on Thursdays, we will be discussing these films in the context of the discourses surrounding them as reflected in the readings for the class. We will focus on the historical, political, economical and cultural contexts of the production and reception of these films, besides engaging with the specificity of genre and authorship of Hindi cinema. We will also explore the way history is revisited, recycled, and reinvented by focusing on the influence of canonical films on contemporary Hindi cinema through the screening and discussion of relevant film clips on Thursdays. For instance, the relationship between Mother India and Chandni Bar, or the affect of Devdas on Dev. D. We will also analyze the role of the stardom of actors (like Madhubala, Tabu, Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan), the authorship of directors (like Guru Dutt and Mani Ratnam), and the contributions of technicians (for instance, cinematographer Binod Pradhan—Parinda, and music director A.R. Rahman—Dil Se and Fiza) in shaping the form and content of the popular Hindi cinema.
FLM 491.001 | Special Topics in Film: Hitchcock | Professor Bill Vincent
Monday 12:40–3:30, Wednesday 12:40–2:30
No filmmaker has been subjected to more critical analysis than Alfred Hitchcock. No director had a clearer theoretical understanding of how films work nor a stronger desire to put his theories to the test. In this seminar we shall analyze some fifteen of Hitchcock’s films both as the objects of numerous theoretical approaches and as manifestations of Hitchcock’s own mastery of the art.
FLM 491.002 | Creating a Weapon of Mass Communication: Research, Writing, & Development for Documentary Film | Professor John Valadez
Mondays 10:20–1:10
Humankind has always been at war. It is a war of memory against forgetting; a war of blindness against sight; a war of compassion against indi erence. And the greatest weapons in that struggle are stories of who we are, what we once were, and the promise of who we might become. Students are invited to join lmmaker John J. Valadez on a road trip through the world of developing an independent non- ction lm – your lm – as a way to explore the human condition. This is not a theoretical course nor will it be technical. Instead it is a practical seminar in how to seek out, nd and create a successful and original narrative that will reach a broad audience, help shape the civic discourse of our community and country, and express truths about the things that drive us apart and bind us together as humans. Students will create an engaging documentary treatment and proposal – with a budget and timeline – that can be used to compete for funding and attract interest from institutional partners. Along the way they will research their subject, nd and connect with their characters, develop the themes, hone the con ict(s), marshal the facts, scout the locations, imagine and write the sequences that will compose their story, consider the audience and the potential for exhibition and impact, and be ready to shoot their own lm, carved from the beauty, irony, pain and triumph of the real world around them.
John J. Valadez is a Peabody Award winning lmmaker. He has been writing, directing and producing nationally broadcast lms for PBS and CNN for 20 years.
Spring 2017
FLM 200 | Film Collective | Professor Joshua Yumibe
Thursday, 7:00pm
This one-credit screening course is available to Film Studies students. Regular attendance and participation is required throughout the semester.
FLM 230 | Introduction to Film | Professor Joshua Yumibe
Monday 9:10–12:00, Wednesday 9:10–11:00, Friday 50 min. (varies by section)
This course introduces core concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial œuvres. The coursework covers a wide range of styles and historical periods in order to assess the multitude of possible film techniques (camera techniques, editing, shot selection, etc.) and principles of narrative structuring. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Success in the course demands rigorous attention to both the films and the readings and requires students to watch, analyze, and write about film in new ways. Throughout the semester, students will learn different methods of viewing, analysis, exposition, and criticism and will have the opportunity to write extensively about the films seen in class. Films discussed include works by Brakhage, Burnett, Deren, Griffith, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Sembene, Sternberg, and Welles.
FLM 260 | Introduction to Digital Film and Media | Professor Swarnavel Pillai
Tuesday, Thursday 10:20–12:10
This course introduces students to significant discourses surrounding cinema and the digital. Scholars have been divided on the way they look at digital technology/ aesthetics and its implications for the cinema. This course while offering a brief overview of the discourse surrounding the transition of the cinema to digital video/media, which varies in its tone from the skeptical to the euphoric, focuses on practice by encouraging students to explore the poetics of cinema though their low-end technology driven projects. The emphasis will on exploring the possibilities offered by digital technology and new media, and working on projects in the category of fiction, non-fiction, and the rarer genre of the experimental. Towards this end, students in this class will be encouraged to experiment with autobiography, biography, video essay, video diary, travelogue etc.
FLM 301 | History of Film after Mid-Century | Professor Justus Nieland
Monday 12:40-3:30, Wednesday 12:40-2:30
This course surveys the history of cinema from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Moving chronologically, we will track a variety of national schools and international trends of filmmaking in order to analyze the global development of film exhibition practices, production cycles and trends, and the changing landscape of distribution. We will examine the formal, industrial, and cultural changes of the medium from neorealism and film noir to the blockbuster franchise cinema of Michael Bay. Putting Hollywood in dialogue with its various “others,” we will engage a variety of national and international film movements: global new waves, auteur and art cinemas, Third Cinema, experimental film, exploitation cinema, contemporary “slow cinema,” and more. We will also discuss key moments in the transformations of Hollywood since 1948: its postwar boom, the blacklist, the decline of the studio system, the rise of independent production, the demise of the production code, the New Hollywood of the 1970s, and the film industry’s gradual conglomeration. The course’s final weeks will be devoted to exploring the so-called “death” of film in the digital domain, from the rise of computer animation and digital 3-D to revolutionary changes in the distribution and consumption of cinema. This broad and comparative approach to the history of cinema will engage with a variety of primary and secondary textual sources in order to assess and cultivate theoretical methods for researching and writing film history.
FLM/MI 311 | Intro to Documentary Production | Professor Swarnavel Pillai
Tuesday, Thursday, 12:40-2:30
This course surveys the history of cinema from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Moving chronologically, we will track a variety of national schools and international trends of filmmaking in order to analyze the global development of film exhibition practices, production cycles and trends, and the changing landscape of distribution. We will examine the formal, industrial, and cultural changes of the medium from neorealism and film noir to the blockbuster franchise cinema of Michael Bay. Putting Hollywood in dialogue with its various “others,” we will engage a variety of national and international film movements: global new waves, auteur and art cinemas, Third Cinema, experimental film, exploitation cinema, contemporary “slow cinema,” and more. We will also discuss key moments in the transformations of Hollywood since 1948: its postwar boom, the blacklist, the decline of the studio system, the rise of independent production, the demise of the production code, the New Hollywood of the 1970s, and the film industry’s gradual conglomeration. The course’s final weeks will be devoted to exploring the so-called “death” of film in the digital domain, from the rise of computer animation and digital 3-D to revolutionary changes in the distribution and consumption of cinema. This broad and comparative approach to the history of cinema will engage with a variety of primary and secondary textual sources in order to assess and cultivate theoretical methods for researching and writing film history.
FLM 334 | Intro to Screenwriting | Professor Jeff Wray
Tuesday, Thursday 10:20-12:10
This course introduces students to significant discourses surrounding ‘acts’ in a screenplay. Starting with the foundational “three-act” screenplay, it interrogates the strengths and weaknesses of formulating rigid structures. Students in this class will learn conventional as well as alternative ways of thinking about the structure of screenplay through analysis of mainstream, art as well as independent categories of films. The aim is to enable students to look critically at the screenplay of seminal and significant films so that they can work out a structure for the story they want to tell. The students in this course are expected to engage with the creative process of writing a screenplay by watching, analyzing, and discussing films, while at the same time pitch their ideas, and observe the transformation these ideas undergo as they work toward the final goal of writing 1/3rd of their story in a chosen screenplay format—in the conventional sense it could be the act-1 and the beginning of act-2, or the end of act-2, and the act-3, but one could opt for an episodic, or a short film, or other unconventional format as well.
FLM 336 | Aesthetics of Film Editing | Pete Johnston
Tuesday, Thursday, 12:40–2:30
This course will introduce students to the aesthetics of editing and the art of video post-production. The focus will be on the history of film editing as well as on the art of organizing the materials for the purposes of the digital-video projects in the fiction and nonfiction genre. Students will be introduced to editing software, like Adobe Premiere Pro/Final Cut X, and expected to work on projects which will involve both archival/found footage and materials originally shot for the class with DSLR cameras. The focus will be on the significance of editing to the fiction, nonfiction as well as experimental categories. Towards this end, students in this class will be expected to engage with classical forms of storytelling, as well as experiment with autobiography, biography, video essay, video diary, and travelogue. The focus on the history, theory, and practice will enable students to understand and experience the centrality of editing to cinema as an art form as well as industrial practice.
FLM 381 | Contemporary Film and Media Theory | Professor Justus Nieland
Monday 4:10-7:00, Wednesday 4:10-6:00
Film theory addresses fundamental questions about the possibilities and limitations of the medium of film, and about the nature of representation, technology, aesthetics, subjectivity, politics, and culture that have gone into film as a cultural phenomena as well as the way that film itself has made contributions to these aspects of our lives. Starting from the late 1960s, contemporary film and media theory explores the development of thinking in and around the cinema and its related arts into the present-day. We will be following the development of film theory chronologically, looking at technological, aesthetic, and political changes in film as it moves from an analog medium into the digital age. We will also move thematically, looking at major trends of thinking in and around film including (but not limited to) psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other relevant schools of thought. The purpose of this course is to give you a working understanding of how film theory has developed over the course of the twentieth century, leading to questions of film and its status as a technology, medium, and cultural form today. The central approach of this class is that both films and readings illustrate important conceptual and theoretical problems of the medium of cinema and, thus, both films and readings will be treated with equal importance. This course relies upon your active participation in readings, screenings, and class discussion and so it is vital that you come to class prepared with questions and concerns from the theoretical texts as well as specific formal details from the films.
FLM 434 | Advanced Screenwriting | Professor Bill Vincent
Monday, Wednesday 7:00-8:50
Okay, you’ve written a script, now what? Revision, tightening, polishing. Workshopping. Another full- length script, better than the first one. Pitching. Treatments. Log lines. Tag lines. After all, you want to know how to sell it.
FLM 435B | Creating the Fiction Film II | Professor Jeff Wray
Tuesday/Thursday 3:00-4:50
The capstone class of the Fiction Film Specialization tasks students with writing, producing, finishing and distributing a short film over two semesters. In the second semester, students pick up right where they left off by moving the film into post-production and distribution. Over the course of 16 weeks they must form a post-production team and complete picture editing, sound sweetening, visual FX and color grading, then take the film into distribution and organize and execute premiere and additional screenings. Past productions have gone on to sell-out screenings at Celebration Cinemas’s Studio C and win awards at film festivals in Michigan and beyond.
FLM 452 | Film, Gender and Sexuality: Francophone Feminist Film | Professor Ellen McCallum
Monday 4:10-7:00, Wednesday 4:10-6:00
This course looks intensively at four francophone women filmmakers working today: Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Catherine Breillat. Interestingly, all four of these filmmakers also hold positions as Professors in Film. These four occupy different generations of filmmaking: Varda’s earliest work was part of the French New Wave in the middle of the last century; Akerman made her mark in the 1970s at the crest of the women’s movement; Denis and Breillat have achieved their success predominantly in the 1990s and 2000s. Collectively, the filmmakers are both French and not French: Varda and Akerman were born in Belgium, Denis and Breillat in France; Denis spent her childhood in Africa, while Akerman lives in New York. The four lives mark the varied ways of being French in the late 20th and early 21st century, a moment when national identity, especially European national identity, is under pressure from globalization, corporatization, and postcolonialization. We will put those films in dialogue with key essays in the development of feminist film theory.
Central concerns of the course will include the relation between women’s cinema practice and feminist film theory; the connection of film form to the representation or expression of identity and desire; the politics and possibilities of an avant-garde then and now; and a greater understanding of the influence of psychoanalysis on feminist film work. The presumption is that students enter with a working knowledge of general film theory and of how to read films critically, as well as familiarity with the rules of classic Hollywood cinema
FLM 460 | Seminar in Digital Film/Media: The Latin Lens | Professor John Valadez
Monday 12:40-3:30, Wednesday 12:40-2:30
A history of race in America told through film and television: Over the past 100 years no artistic medium has had a bigger hand in shaping public perceptions of Latino identity than the stories we project in cinemas and watch on television. In this course we will use fiction and non-film to examine the intersection of Latino representation, art, commerce and social change across the 20th century. The centerpiece will be an examination of the lives and struggles of individual artists who sought to re-shape, work within, undermine, work around, and vanquish damaging presumptions deeply ingrained in the American mind as they sought to pursue viable careers, and imaginative artistic lives within the medium.
The all star cast for this course includes people like: Dolores de Rio, Ricardo Montalbán, Lynda Carter, Cheech Marin, Marlon Brando, Batman, Anthony Quinn, Inocente, Sixto Rodriguez, Luiz Valdez, Raquel Welch, Rita Hayworth, Edward James Olmos, America Ferrera, George A. Romero, Gregory Nava, The Lone Ranger, George Lopez, Robert Rodriguez, Alejandro Iñárritu, Jennifer Lopez, Freddie Prinze, The Frito Bandito, Dezi Arnez, and of course…Speedy Gonzalez.
FLM 480 | Seminar in Film Theory: Picturing the World in Cinema | Professor Ken Harrow
Monday 12:40-3:30, Wednesday 12:40-2:30
This course will ask how the various cinemas typically taken to constitute “World Cinema” have worked to establish the category as a global phenomenon. For some time the category of World Cinema has been a contested one in Cinema Studies. This is due, in part, to the position from which the category has been constructed and viewed, with Hollywood or commercial western cinema used as a baseline for determining what constitutes successful or normal cinema. When foreign film industries began to develop their own styles or practices, they were measured in relationship to dominant western patterns and usually judged to be inferior or emergent, and exotic or even esoteric. The appellation World Art Cinema emerged as a category, while Global Cinema competed as globalization theory began to privilege commercial networks, economic and cultural flows, alongside critiques of commodity capitalism. This course will open up the central issues that have arisen with the prevalence of cultural focus on “world” or “global” designations within Film Studies discourses. Sample films to be discussed include:
The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Afro-Britain)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mali)
Divine Intervention (Elie Suleiman, Palestine)
Tehran Taxi (Jafar Panafi, Iran)
Winter Sleep (Nuri Ceylan, Turkey)
The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, Canada)
The Secret in Their Eyes, (Juan José Campanella, Argentina)
Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal),
Dirty, Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, England)
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK/India)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair, Pakistan)