Courses & Special Topics Fall/Winter 2011-12

“Looking at Movies”

Instructor: José Sánchez

Movies challenge our senses, emotions, and intellect arousing our most public and private feelings. Yet, movies are not reality only illusions, constructions of “realities”; their form and content work interrelated to create a meaning that asks us to accept it as a given rather than as a creative process.

This course will explore a variety of ways in which we can look at movies by closely studying the interrelation of cinematic elements: narrative, composition, design, cinematography, acting, editing, sound, technology, and history.

A combination of written exercises, class discussions and, most importantly, watching movies will show us how we can think and write about films by understanding and appreciating the principles of how filmmakers make the decisions that assist them to construct a movie.

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Instructor: Erika Balsom

After taking this course, you will never look at movies the same way again. Throughout the year, we will develop critical viewing skills that will allow you to consider how cinema has operated as a mass entertainment, an art form, and a social practice since its invention in 1895. Moving beyond a “thumbs up, thumbs down” mentality, we will interrogate questions of form, style, aesthetics, and politics. By the end of the year, students will have developed a familiarity with the formal language of cinema and the fundamental concepts of film studies. This course is intended as a gateway to a major in Film Studies, but will be of interest and relevance to students coming from other areas of study as well.

The course will be divided into four units:

1) Style and Technique: This unit will introduce students to the basic formal elements of cinema, such as narrative, mise-en-scène, editing, cinematography, sound, and the impact of digital technologies.

2) The Filmmaker: This unit will examine the figure of the filmmaker in different production contexts, such as Hollywood, European art cinema, experimental film, postcolonial film, and independent film.

3) Film genres: This unit will unpack the category of genre as a way of understanding film through two case studies, melodrama and film noir.

4) Special focus on documentary and the question of truth: This unit will delve into how ideas of truth and authenticity operate in non-fiction filmmaking. We will ask: what makes an image “true” or “real”? What strategies and discourses work to produce a film image as trustworthy and/or authentic.

Evaluation will consist of a midterm test, a final exam, two essays, participation in discussion sections, and attendance.

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Instructor: André Loiselle

TENTATIVE COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES:

The objective of FILM 2000 is to familiarize students with all the main theories and modes of critical thinking that have influenced the study of cinema since its inception.

The first part of the course (Fall) will focus primarily on film theory prior to the 1980s. Starting with theories of the silent film, montage and realist theories, the course will then examine hermeneutic appro­aches developed in the 1960s and 1970s including auteur theory, genre criticism, psychoanalysis and feminist theory.

The second part of the course (Winter) will focus on the main paradigm shift of recent theoretical thinking, namely, the passage from structuralism to post-structuralism. We will explore theories of the past 25 years that emphasize the destabilisation of fixed categories, beginning with dialogism and decon­struc­tion. Other current critical practices that will be discussed in class include post-colonial film theory, masculinist film theory, queer theory, historiography and the theory of new media.

METHOD OF EVALUATION:
Four Short Essays (5 to 7 pages each essay): 70%
Final Take-Home Exam: 30%

READINGS: all readings will be available in a Coursepack on sale at Haven Books.
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Instructor: Sylvie Jasen

This course is a historical survey of documentary cinema, providing an overview of the canonical films, filmmakers, and movements. We will examine changes in styles and conventions in relation to shifts in technologies and socio-cultural contexts. A wide variety of documentary practices will be considered, including ethnographic, poetic, and experimental forms. Emphasis is on critical analysis of the films screened, with attention to the issues that have been central to documentary theory and practice.

Required Texts: Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film, 2nd Ed. Additional articles will be collected in a course pack for purchase.

Evaluation: Attendance (10%), Short Essay (25%), Final Essay (35%), Exam (30%)

Lecture and screening 3 hours a week and a tutorial/discussion session 1 hour a week.

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Course Topic: The South Asian Diaspora

Instructor: Saalem Humayun

The goal of this course is to question the idea of nation within cinematic practice. It does not look at the cinema of one political entity, but rather how this globally displaced community identifies and negotiates itself through film, across many political boundaries. How can we consider the idea of transnationalism in light of these films? What connections can we draw among these films that share many political identities, but all deal with displaced identities within different national contexts and political arenas of production? How do these films articulate and negotiate cultural dialogue between ideas of home and host cultures, as well as notions of belonging and identity?

Issues of community, gender, sexuality, violence, race, class and youth will figure prominently and will be recurring topics in this course.

Evaluation: tba

Format: lecture and screening three hours a week; lecture one hour a week.
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Instructor: Sylvie Jasen

This course will concentrate on British cinema. We will examine works by such filmmakers as Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson, Stephen Frears, and Derek Jarman, along with the ideological and aesthetic features of key movements: the documentary film movement, Free Cinema, and social realism. Although primary attention will be given to narrative feature films, the course will also touch on experimental practices and the impact of documentary. We will also attend to the structure of the British film industry with a specific interest in the significance of television (the BBC and Channel 4) and such institutions as the UK Film Council. However, the course will particularly focus on the ways in which films reflect and respond to issues of the period in which they are made, including historical racial and class tensions, the effects of Thatcherism, and the most recent attention to questions of immigration and the implications of EU membership.

Required Texts: a course pack will be available for purchase.

Evaluation: TBA

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Instructor: Aboubakar Sanogo

This course will examine the works of two major Hollywood film directors, Billy Wilder and Steven Soderbergh around the twin axes of authorship and independence. Through looking at their respective relationship to Hollywood, and their contribution to debates on genre, gender, and the nature and future of the cinema, the course will trace a history of the concepts of authorship and independence underscoring their evolution and transformation from the classical period to the present.

Lecture and screening 3 hours a week; lecture one hour a week

Evaluation: Midterm (mid-October), research essay and final exam.

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Instructor: Malini Guha

Readings: Reading material will be available in a “course pack.”

Instructor’s Statement: This course is structured around the study of three filmmakers, namely Pedro Almódovar, Ousmane Sembene and Claire Denis. We will investigate the thematic motifs and stylistic tendencies found across the work of each of these three directors while also paying close attention to issues of gender, genre, intertextuality, political concerns and national/production contexts. We will simultaneously survey some of the more recent literature concerning cinema and authorship, thereby allowing us to examine key developments within this branch of film studies including the ‘return of the author’, the ‘commerce of authorship’ and ‘auteur desire’, as they bear a certain relevance to the directors under investigation in the course

Evaluation: One short paper, one long research paper, and a final in -class test.

Lecture Format: Lecture and screening three hours a week: lecture one hour a week

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Course Topic: Science Fiction

Instructor: Corey Stevenson

Text, and/or Software: N/A

Instructor’s Statement: This course will trace the development of the Science Fiction genre in film, and examine its interaction with and relation to its larger social environment in an effort to understand both the industrial and cultural imperatives that shape its evolution. Such an examination will touch upon questions of definition, generic identity, boundaries and hybridity that will provide a broader understanding of the concept of genre itself within film.

Evaluation: Mid-term exam, final essay, participation in group discussion

Lecture format: Lecture and screening three hours a week, discussion one hour a week
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Instructor: Aboubakar Sanago

This two-semester course takes as its object of study the sum total of all films made anywhere, everywhere and at any time in the world. How then to make a history of such a corpus?  We will seek various lines of inquiry in an attempt to answer this foundational question. As a point of departure, we will deploy temporalization (history), spatialization (geopolitics) and aesthetics as three categories around which such an inquiry could be organized.

The category of history will allow us to trace in time the evolutions and transformations of the modalities of use of the  film medium from its beginning in the late 19^th century to their current incarnations in the first two decades of the 21^st century. Important historical events and moments which sometimes enabled or accelerated these transformations will be studied. These include the advent of modernity, the coming of communism, the rise of fascism,  two world wars, colonialism, decolonization, the Cold War, May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the post 9/11 moment and the current age of globalization.

Through the category of geopolitics we will be able to articulate the multiple determinations of these very transformations. Indeed one such determination is the inextricability of fate of the cinema from the political and economic status, place and role in the global concert of nations, of the states or nations in which it is produced. Thus, we will look at states and nations (and capital) as major enablers of the cinema around the world, and, transversally, at the ways in which the cinema has been used, produced, distributed, circulated, exhibited and debated between, across, throughout, in spite of, against and beyond various states, nations, regions and continents such as Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Finally, the category of aesthetics will allow us to trace important aspects of the evolution and transformations of film form, from the age of the cinema of attractions, to the advent of sound, from the movement to the time image, through such major film movements as German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, neo-realism, the new waves and new cinemas, third cinemas, along with new cinematic propositions from around the world. Continuing formal innovations will also be traced through such new technology as digitization, 3D, YouTube, VOD alongside an exploration of the significance of more traditional exhibition spaces like the museum, the cinematheque and the film festival.

Evaluation: critical responses, research paper, final exam

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Instructor: Tony Larder

The 1970s brought about one of the most creative production eras in American film history.  It also saw the emergence of a subterranean industry of independent cinema that challenged mainstream Hollywood by eschewing good taste in favor of taboo-breaking and often sleazy genre films that dominated the less respectable exhibition routes of rural drive-ins and urban “grind-houses”.  We will look at the key genres associated with these exploitation independents (including horror, action, and sex comedy) along with discussions of some of the most prolific filmmakers working in exploitation from its heyday through to the “shot-on-video” works that emerge as exhibition trends change. These were films by men and women who often seized the opportunities offered by savvy producers to explore their obsessions and advance personal visions, while trying to make profitable films. We will look at marketing and exhibition in some detail, and briefly discuss Canada’s output of exploitation independent cinema of the same period.  Attendance and active participation is expected.

Lecture 1 hour/week, discussion 1 hour/week, screening 2 hours/week.

Evaluation: essay (30%), exam (50%), attendance, and active participation throughout course discussions (20%).

Required readings: TBD, there will likely be suggested readings on library reserve, or a textbook.

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Topic: Toronto on Film

Instructor: Steve Rifkin

How does cultural identity shape our sense of place?  In this course, we will attempt to answer this question by looking at cinematic depictions of Toronto, Canada’s largest city.  Examining a range of Canadian fiction films, we will consider how the idea of “Toronto” has served historically as a cultural construct and an imagined narrative space.  We will see the roles that this space has played in narratives that seek to negotiate and challenge discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, as well as regional, national, and transnational identity.  Films to be studied will include work by Atom Egoyan, Clément Virgo, Patricia Rozema, and Deepa Mehta.

Required texts: TBA

Evaluation: reading responses, film analysis, final paper, and class participation.

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Course Topic: (Trans)Gendering outside the Mainstream.

Instructor: José Sánchez

Readings: tba

Instructor’s Statement: This course traces the recent history of scholarship and media production on gender, sexuality and the body. We will make cinema the object of cultural studies while exploring the interrelationships between alternative (independent/outside the mainstream) institutions of cinema and the construct of gender. How do these films shape, naturalize and subvert notions such as femininity, masculinity, sexuality and the natural body? How have feminist, queer and other alternative filmmakers intervened in these representations? How do the representation of gender/sexuality and other variables inform/confront audiences and fans? As gendered and sexual creatures, are we natural or cultural, organic or constructed beings?

Evaluation: Response paper, Critical analysis, Final essay/assignment and student participation in group discussions.”

Lecture format: Lecture & Screening (three hours/week); seminar (one hour/week)
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also listed as MUSI 3402

Instructor: James Deaville)

This course examines the historical use of music (and sound) in film, from the silent era to the present day, studying the techniques, styles and theory of film music through the examination of selected scenes.  We begin with a brief introduction to the technical aspects of film music, then chronologically and theoretically survey its history (the major portion of the course) and conclude with the consideration of such topics as music in Bollywood, films about music and music for television and animation.  Lectures are copiously illustrated with examples from films. Instead of a formal term paper, students will be required to write a 1500-word review of the music for one film, from a selection of four films determined by the class. Attendance at the weekly screenings is required.

Evaluation: Midterm (30%), Final (35%), Review (25%), 2 scheduled quizzes (10%)

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Instructor: Malini Guha

Readings: tba

Instructor’s Statement: In this course, we will study advanced topics in film history and film theory. The course is structured in accordance with a number of key moments within both domains of study, in a manner that seeks to demonstrate the often inextricable link between the two as in contemporary film scholarship, the theoretical ‘turn’ within film history is echoed by the historical ‘turn’ within film theory. During the fall term, we will begin with the ‘modernity’ thesis, which will allow us to situate the birth of cinema within a larger framework of historical transformation and then move chronologically through significant periods of film history, including the coming of sound, colour and other moments of technological change and development. Alongside of this, we will also chart the development of film theory, beginning with scholars associated with European modernity, including Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in the fall term while moving towards contemporary film theory in the winter term, ending with considerations of how digital technology is altering the way we think historically as well as theoretically about the cinema and its future.

Evaluation: One mid term test, one research paper, one final test and class participation

Lecture Format: Lecture and screening, three hours a week, discussion two hours a week

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Course Topic: Silent Cinema

Course Instructor: Murray Leeder

Instructor’s Statement: This class deals with cinema from roughly 1895-1927, the formative silent period neglected in the study of cinema. It will pay attention to the aesthetics, concerns and artistic movements of the silent period, balancing well-known canonical films with more eccentric and obscure fare. The course reading list will draw on the wealth of scholarship on silent cinema to have emerged in the last few decades and pay particularly close attention to the debate about the modernity thesis between (most prominently) Tom Gunning and David Bordwell.

Evaluation: Essays and reaction papers

Lecture format: Three hour lecture/screening, seminar one hour a week.
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“Essay Film”

Instructor: Erika Balsom

This course will examine the peculiar blend of politics and poetics that marks the rather elusive form of the essay film. We will ask: What are the characteristics of the essay film? Is it a form distinct from documentary or a subspecies of it? What are some of its main strategies and concerns? After establishing some introductory parameters, our inquiry will proceed through three rubrics that have been richly explored through the filmic essay: identities, geographies, and histories.

Films by: Thom Andersen, Jean-Luc Godard, Patricio Guzman, William E. Jones, Patrick Keiller, Chris Marker, Trinh Minh-ha, Mark Rappaport, Hito Steyerl, Agnes Varda, and others.

Assigned texts: Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker + a course reader

Evaluation: Two essays, a presentation, and participation

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Instructor: Charles O’Brien

This course introduces fourth-year students to methods of advanced film-historical research.   It focuses on a basic question in film scholarship:  the status of films as objects of historical study.  The question has become imposing since the 1980s, when the study of film history began to be conceived not merely as distinct from the project of analyzing films but as opposed to it.  While devotees of film analysis are said to remain focused on the filmic “text,” film historians are said to take a broader view by situating films in various extra-filmic “contexts,” whether economic, technological, political or social.   Recognizing the validity of both textual and contextual approaches to the study of film history, this course uses musical films of the late 1920s/early 1930s as a case study for exploring approaches to film-historical study in which the projects of film analysis and film history are combined and integrated.

Topics covered by the course include:  the documentation (film reviews, trade press reports, drafts of scripts, interviews with filmmakers, correspondence, censorship records, etc.) used in making film-historical claims;  and the limits and possibilities for contextualizing films relative to aesthetic, psychological, economic, technological, and social conditions and forces;  and technical and aesthetic issues pertaining to film music.  The course will also touch on the practicalities of designing and writing a film studies research proposal that might ultimately be submitted to a funding agency and/or an admissions committee for a graduate program.   The course is thus relevant to students considering graduate work.

The main course requirements are:   reading the weekly assignments and attending all lectures and screenings;  two exams (a midterm and a final);  and a paper to be submitted at the end of term.  Regarding the paper, students will be asked to choose a topic pertaining to how a specific song functions in a specific film.  Though the course emphasizes the late 1920s/early 1930s, students can feel free to chose for the paper assignment a film from any era, country, or genre.
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Instructor: Joseph Lipsett

This course is interested in examining the audio visual representations of the convergence of humans and technology.  In recent years the growth of new technologies – DVD, MP3s, the Internet, nanotechnology  – have radically altered the ways in which humans interact with technology in all facets of our lives. The goal is to broaden our understanding of the impact of technology in different sectors of our lives, from the mundane everyday to the cutting edge of science. Sample topics may include computers, virtual reality and online environments, videogames, social media and online identities, surveillance, medical care, robots and cyborgs, time and space travel, performance art, and architecture. Films will provide entry points from which to launch discussion, although students will be encouraged to consider materials from a variety of disciplines, including communications, sociology, gender studies, and cyberculture studies.

Evaluation: Seminar presentations, other assignments TBD

Readings will consist of online journal articles, chapter excerpts and supplemental films

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Topic: Cahiers du Cinéma and the Birth of the French New Wave

Instructor: Steve Rifkin

This course explores the fascinating relationship between film criticism, theory, and practice that emerged in 1950s France as part of the movement known as the French New Wave.   Against the backdrop of a unique set of social and cultural conditions, we will study contributions by famous critics at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, such as François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, and see how these helped set the stage for their later accomplishments as filmmakers.   We will also examine films by directors who were a major influence on the New Wave (Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini) and consider the work of other important French filmmakers at the time (Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda).

Required texts: TBA

Evaluation: reading responses, film analysis, final paper, and class participation.

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Topic: Theory of Film Spectatorship

Instructor: Steve Rifkin

The very idea of cinema begins and ends with acts of spectatorship.  Yet most theories of film never ask how – or why – people watch movies.  This course offers an overview of the various ways that film theory has tried to address the issue of narrative film spectatorship.  We will trace changes and continuities from early writing on cinema, through the development of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and feminist film theories, to more recent work in audience and reception theory.  Our goal will be to account for how and why the spectator comes to be theorized in different ways at different moments in the history of film theory.

Required texts: course pack.

Evaluation: reading responses, film analysis, final paper, and class participation.

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Instructor: Saalem Humayun

Details: tba

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Cinema and Mobility

Instructor: Malini Guha

In this course, we will study the relationship between cinema and mobility, as developed within a series of national and historical contexts. Topics that we will examine include considerations of cinematic mobility in terms of textual analysis, with respect to film genres like the road movie and finally, in relationship to questions of gender and race as they pertain to various forms of migration, either from the country to the city or across continents.

Evaluation: Paper Proposal, One Long Paper, One Presentation, Class Participation

Lecture Format: Lecture and screening, three hours a week, discussion one hour a week

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Instructor: José Sánchez

Queer Theory is a rapidly developing field that since its emergence a decade ago has transformed the study of gender and sexuality in almost all the academic fields. The term queer names or describes identities and practices that foreground the instability inherent in the supposedly stable relationship between anatomical sex, sexual desire and gender. For this reason, queer studies is especially interested in non-normative forms of identity, or forms in which sex, gender and sexuality do not line up in the socially prescribed way.

New Queer Cinema is the name given to a wave of queer films that gained critical acclaim on the festival circuit in the early 1990s. These films represented the exciting prospect that lesbian and gay images and filmmakers had turned a corner. No longer burdened by the approval seeking of positive imagery, or the obscurity of marginal production, queer films proved that they could be radical and popular, stylish and economically viable. Yet, a new and enduring sector of popular radical queer work has failed to materialize even though New Queer Cinema started Hollywood’s awareness of a queer-friendly audience and its appropriation (and dilution?) of queer matters.

This course will examine both Queer Theory and New Queer Cinema. It will serve to analyze the queering of contemporary western culture focusing not only on the films but in their theorization. It will enable us to explore the possible gap between the theory and the practice taking into consideration issues of historiography, iconography, and audience reception as they permeate and negotiate different socio-cultural, political and academic fields.

Evaluation: 2 critical analysis, final essay and student participation in group discussions.

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Also listed as FILM 5506W

Instructor: Aboubakar Sanogo

This seminar will explore major theoretical debates and historical moments in African Cinema(s). We will look at such theoretical questions as the specificity vs. relationality debate, the language(s) of African cinema(s), the question of the articulation of the national, the regional, the continental and the global, auteurism, the problem of the popular, spectatorship, feminism, cinephilia and the challenge of the digital among others.

These theoretical explorations will have an historical anchoring through which we will situate practices and cultures of cinema in Africa from the early and silent cinemas through the present, highlighting turning points from the colonial era to the sixties through to the second decade of the 21^st century. We will navigate these key historical moments via the works of such major classical auteurs as Ousmane Sembene, Youssef Chahine, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety and Souleymane Cisse and contemporary auteurs as John Akomfrah, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Raja Amari, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Faouzi Bensaidi and, indeed, through Nollywood cinema.

Evaluation: Paper proposal, seminar presentation, position paper, final paper.

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Instructor: Erika Balsom

This course will concentrate on time as a category of analysis. Cinema possesses distinct affinities with the rationalization of labour and standardization of time that took place at the end of the nineteenth century, and yet it also provides a way of negotiating and resisting these processes, as it imagines alternative relations to standardized time. The first half of this course will proceed from this hypothesis to explore how cinema provided a way for the twentieth century to re-think its changed relation to time after industrial modernity. In the second half of the semester, we will open our consideration of temporality from the strictly cinematic to examine how the advent of networked, digital media-with its spatial metaphors and obsession with asymptotically approaching simultaneity-has changed our lived relation to time and recast conceptions of cinematic time.

Topics will include amnesia, boredom, duration, distraction, finitude, indexicality, memory, the supposed “death of cinema,” the remembered film, real time, and simultaneity.

Readings by Augé, Bellour, Bergson, Doane, Deleuze, Rodowick, Virilio, and others. Screenings include Conner, Marker, Neveldine+Taylor, Renais, Tarr, Trecartin, Tsai, Warhol, and others.

Seminar presentation: 30%
Participation: 20%
Final research paper: 50%

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Instructor: Aboubakar Sanogo

This seminar will explore major theoretical debates and historical moments in African Cinema(s). We will look at such theoretical questions as the specificity vs. relationality debate, the language(s) of African cinema(s), the question of the articulation of the national, the regional, the continental and the global, auteurism, the problem of the popular, spectatorship, feminism, cinephilia and the challenge of the digital among others.

These theoretical explorations will have an historical anchoring through which we will situate practices and cultures of cinema in Africa from the early and silent cinemas through the present, highlighting turning points from the colonial era to the sixties through to the second decade of the 21^st century. We will navigate these key historical moments via the works of such major classical auteurs as Ousmane Sembene, Youssef Chahine, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety and Souleymane Cisse and contemporary auteurs as John Akomfrah, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Raja Amari, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Faouzi Bensaidi and, indeed, through Nollywood cinema.

Evaluation: Paper proposal, seminar presentation, position paper, final paper.

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