2021 – 2022 Courses

This one-credit screening course is available to Film Studies students. Regular attendance and participation is required throughout the semester.

Professor Kuhu Tanvir
Thursday 7:00pm, B122 Wells

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. 

Professor Joshua Yumibe 
Tuesday 9:10–12:00, Thursday 9:10–11:00, Friday 50 min. (varies by section)

TBA

Professor Bill Vincent

Monday 12:40–3:30; Wednesday 12:40–2:30; EBH 307

Jim Jarmusch & World Cinema

Professor Joshua Yumibe

The films of Jim Jarmusch have been a hallmark of global art cinema for the last forty years. Working at his own pace, outside of mainstream Hollywood, he has been in so many ways the auteurist model of independent (“indie”) cinema, particularly as it flourished in the 1990s. Jarmusch has not been only the director of thirteen feature films thus far, as well as several music documentaries, but he has also written and co-produced all of his films, maintaining final cut as maintaining his negatives and copyright. Through this tight control, the look, feel, and pacing of his films are profoundly unique. Drenched in sound, and wry humor, lush greys in his black-and-white films, and the lushest hues in his color ones, these are films to be watched again, and again. Yet all of this is also not to say that Jarmusch has operated in a vacuum, far from it. His works are profoundly grounded in this world and reflect its wondrous strangeness. Originally from Ohio, he moved to New York in the 1970s to study literature at Columbia University. He discovered cinema at the end of his undergraduate degree, in a study abroad year in Paris where he confessedly spent most of his time at the Cinematheque française—experiencing the best of film history and world cinema, including classical Hollywood. Thus, rediscovering his homeland and calling from a distant shore, he returned to New York and took up filmmaking in NYU’s graduate program where he was a classmate of Spike Lee, student of Nicholas Ray, and collaborator with Wim Wenders. This is an introductory course, with no prerequisites. Along with focusing on Jim Jarmusch and wildly interconnected world that his films inhabit, we will explore the basic tools of film analysis as well as the concept of film authorship.

In person: Thursdays 4:10–6:00, 307 Bessey Hall

Virtual (asynchronous) film screening each week

What’s changed in filmmaking technology in the past 20 years, and what impact does that have on the stories we tell? Have digital image-making tools, editing software, and distribution channels fundamentally changed the types of stories being told and the types of artists telling them? In this hybrid course we introduce students to a variety of emerging filmmaking technologies and give them a grounding in technical skills necessary to then move on to higher order concerns of storytelling. We screen, analyze and discuss new works and look over the evolution of filmmaking technology and how it relates to this historical moment. And students produce a variety of work in documentary, fiction, and experimental forms, focusing on iteration and repetition to hone filmmaking skills. 

Pete Johnston
Tuesday 4:10–7:00, Thursday 4:10–6:00

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. 

Professor Kaveh Askari 
Monday 12:40–3:30, Wednesday 12:40–2:30, B122 Wells

This course offers an exploration of the documentary film as a category on its own, with an implicit opposition between nonfiction and fiction films. Starting with the early silent films (actualities) we will study the opposition between “fiction” and “document.” Through the different theories of the documentary form, and by studying various forms of the documentary film, we will explore how a filmmaker mediates between the viewer and the subject as he tries to represent or reconstruct reality. We will analyze the different styles of the documentary films and their content to discuss the fundamental issues concerning the documentary form: What is the “voice” of documentary? Is it possible to film an event objectively? How does persuasion inflect a documentary? How does a documentary persuade its viewers? What is the role of narration in documentaries?

This course has an equally significant production component to it, and it will introduce the students to the basics of production like shooting with a camcorder or a DSLR still/video camera. The semester will be divided equally between learning history, theory, and production, and the students are encouraged to shoot with easily accessible technology like the cell phone or the DSLR cameras and edit their footage with the basic editing software installed in their computer or in our editing lab. The focus will be on informed narration and creativity.

This is an interdepartmental course that is required for the Minor in Documentary Production. Students should register for MI 311.

Professor Alexandra Hidalgo
TBA

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.

Professor Swarnavel Pillai
Monday, Wednesday 4:10–6:00, EBH 307

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.

Professor Rick Blackwood
Monday, Wednesday 12:40-2:30, Wells Hall A236

TBA

Professor Kuhu Tanvir
Tuesday 12:40–3:30, Thursday 12:40–2:30, B122 Wells

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.

Professor Ellen McCallum 
Monday 4:10-7:00, Wednesday 4:10-6:00, B122 Wells

This seminar explores what anthropologist and media historian Brian Larkin calls the “poetics and politics of infrastructure” through a range of films, videos, and art practices, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Both omnipresent and unseen, infrastructure has a way of receding from view until it fails, often catastrophically. Think of the BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the Dakota Access Pipeline stand-off, or even closer to home, the Flint water crisis. Globally, contemporary debates about the Anthropocene have brought into geological visibility the vast infrastructural project of modernity, one whose disastrous ecological implications, one would think, can no longer be refuted. Following the catastrophic Trump administration, which came to power on the promise of linking a restrictive nationalist vision to promises of infrastructural renewal, President Biden has promised to turn stake his narrow Democratic majority on a major infrastructure agenda.

Infrastructure, for ever-more-urgent reasons, continues to structure and demand our attention, our energies, and our resources, in every sense. Infrastructure’s current return to visibility in political and civic life has produced a discernible infrastructural turn in arts and humanities scholarship over the last decade. “To be modern,” as historian of technology Paul Edwards once insisted, “is to live by means of infrastructures”—systems that link the various scales of time, space, and social organization, and thus form the socio-technical foundations of modernity itself. This renewed attention to the substrates of modernities past and present is apparent in a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary formations, from film and media studies and theory, to art and architectural history, cultural studies, literary studies, urban studies, environmental studies, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, the digital humanities, and their various intersections and overlaps.

This seminar aims to provide a broad introduction to the infrastructural turn in film and media studies, making visible the buried networks and systems that bring modern communities into being, inspire political activity and imagination, and organize bodies, labor, and commodities. Infrastructure has long been at the heart of debates about citizenship, democracy, and visions of a just public life. In this course, then, we will pay particular attention to the infrastructural dimensions of modern media, which function not just to transmit messages, but as what John Durham Peters calls “the fundamental constituents for organization.” This is what Peters and others have identified as the logistical dimension of media. World-enabling infrastructures,” media track and orient us in time and space, manage data and world, distribute and manage bodies and populations, and shift the basic conditions of culture and being.

Our goal will be to discuss how and why infrastructure has returned as a crucial critical problem in film and media studies, as well as for humanities scholars, for a range of artistic practices, and for contemporary civic and political life. We will pursue the substrates of cinema on two levels at once: we will explore infrastructure’s visibility in film and video (as representation, as documentation, as a formal and aesthetic matter); and we will think about film’s own infrastructures—the materialities, ontologies, resources, and modes of distribution that lay beneath film, and constitute the medium’s conditions of possibility. We will attempt to foster an infrastructural attentiveness to how and where media come from, what resources they consume and distribute, and how, elementally, they came to be what they are. Films and videos will be chosen for the range of infrastructural imaginaries and objects they take up.

Professor Justus Nieland

Tuesday 9:10–12:00; Thursday 9:10–11:00, EBH 307

Design and development of documentaries in a team setting using video and audio, still photography, web design, and print media. Participation in a production cycle including idea generation, research, design, production, and distribution. Capstone course for the Documentary Production Minor.

Cross listed with MI411B. Enroll in MI411B.

Professors Ling Hsu and John Valadez 
Time TBA

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. 

Professor Bill Vincent 
Monday, Wednesday 7:00-8:50, EBH 307

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.

Peter Johnston & Rola Nashef
Tuesday, Thursday 12:40-2:30, 307 EBH 

TBA

Professor Kuhu Tanvir 
Thursday 4:10–6:00, C640 Wells; Thursday 7:00–10:00, B122 Wells

TBA

Professor Rick Blackwood
Monday 9:10–12:00; Wednesday 9:10–11:00; EBH 307

This course offers an introduction to methods of interpreting, writing on, and teaching film. It is designed to help graduate students to develop a research and teaching trajectory in cinema and media studies for their work at MSU and beyond. Students will begin by engaging with tools of close analysis and basic concepts of film form. They will move from there to categories of genre, authorship and other critical traditions, central to the formation of the discipline of cinema studies, that discuss aspects of the medium as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus, and cultural practice. The course will introduce students to subfields of film history and theory, race cinema, and of studies of media infrastructures as they pertain to cinema as a medium in global circulation. We will have ongoing discussions of teaching and syllabi development throughout the semester. Screenings will include work by filmmakers such as Burnett, Deren, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Jia, Mambéty, Rohrwacher, and Weber.

Professor Joshua Yumibe 
Tuesday 12:40-3:30, Thursday 12:40–2:30, C640 Wells

This seminar explores what anthropologist and media historian Brian Larkin calls the “poetics and politics of infrastructure” through a range of films, videos, and art practices, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Both omnipresent and unseen, infrastructure has a way of receding from view until it fails, often catastrophically. Think of the BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the Dakota Access Pipeline stand-off, or even closer to home, the Flint water crisis. Globally, contemporary debates about the Anthropocene have brought into geological visibility the vast infrastructural project of modernity, one whose disastrous ecological implications, one would think, can no longer be refuted. Following the catastrophic Trump administration, which came to power on the promise of linking a restrictive nationalist vision to promises of infrastructural renewal, President Biden has promised to turn stake his narrow Democratic majority on a major infrastructure agenda.

Infrastructure, for ever-more-urgent reasons, continues to structure and demand our attention, our energies, and our resources, in every sense. Infrastructure’s current return to visibility in political and civic life has produced a discernible infrastructural turn in arts and humanities scholarship over the last decade. “To be modern,” as historian of technology Paul Edwards once insisted, “is to live by means of infrastructures”—systems that link the various scales of time, space, and social organization, and thus form the socio-technical foundations of modernity itself. This renewed attention to the substrates of modernities past and present is apparent in a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary formations, from film and media studies and theory, to art and architectural history, cultural studies, literary studies, urban studies, environmental studies, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, the digital humanities, and their various intersections and overlaps.

This seminar aims to provide a broad introduction to the infrastructural turn in film and media studies, making visible the buried networks and systems that bring modern communities into being, inspire political activity and imagination, and organize bodies, labor, and commodities. Infrastructure has long been at the heart of debates about citizenship, democracy, and visions of a just public life. In this course, then, we will pay particular attention to the infrastructural dimensions of modern media, which function not just to transmit messages, but as what John Durham Peters calls “the fundamental constituents for organization.” This is what Peters and others have identified as the logistical dimension of media. World-enabling infrastructures,” media track and orient us in time and space, manage data and world, distribute and manage bodies and populations, and shift the basic conditions of culture and being.

Our goal will be to discuss how and why infrastructure has returned as a crucial critical problem in film and media studies, as well as for humanities scholars, for a range of artistic practices, and for contemporary civic and political life. We will pursue the substrates of cinema on two levels at once: we will explore infrastructure’s visibility in film and video (as representation, as documentation, as a formal and aesthetic matter); and we will think about film’s own infrastructures—the materialities, ontologies, resources, and modes of distribution that lay beneath film, and constitute the medium’s conditions of possibility. We will attempt to foster an infrastructural attentiveness to how and where media come from, what resources they consume and distribute, and how, elementally, they came to be what they are. Films and videos will be chosen for the range of infrastructural imaginaries and objects they take up.

Professor Justus Nieland

Tuesday 9:10–12:00; Thursday 9:10–11:00, EBH 307