Courses

In this course we survey a number of popular American film genres, including but not limited to the western, the musical, the woman’s film, the war film, horror and science-fiction. Who defines genres? What are the conventions and expectations associated with various genres? What is the cultural function of genre storytelling? Do genres change over time? Assignments aim to develop skills in film analysis, research and writing. Requirements include two screenings per week.

This class introduces students to the process of making moving-image media. How do we generate creative ideas? How do we translate those ideas into moving images and sound? Students will draw inspiration from a variety of sources that are personal, cultural, and observational, and in doing so, develop confidence in their own artistic practice and perspective. Production exercises using consumer tools (smartphones, basic editing software) will introduce students to strategies for ideation and development for narrative, documentary, and experimental approaches to media production. Those planning to enroll in 200-level CAMS production courses will need to take CAMS 111 as a prerequisite. Students who have taken CAMS 111 cannot take CAMS 101.

This course introduces students to the basic terms, concepts and methods used in cinema studies and helps build critical skills for analyzing films, technologies, industries, styles and genres, narrative strategies and ideologies. Students will develop skills in critical viewing and careful writing via assignments such as a short response essay, a plot segmentation, a shot breakdown, and various narrative and stylistic analysis papers. Classroom discussion focuses on applying critical concepts to a wide range of films. Requirements include two screenings per week. Extra time.

This class introduces students to the full range of production tools and forms, building both the technical and conceptual skills needed to continue at more advanced levels. We will explore the aesthetics and mechanics of shooting digital video, the role of sound and how to record and mix it, field and studio production, lighting, and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Course work will include individual and group production projects, readings, and writing. This is an essential foundation for anyone interested in moving-image production and learning the specifics of CAMS’ studios, cameras, and lighting equipment.

This course will explore the techniques and formal filmmaking strategies that can be employed when working on a soundstage, as well as a grounding in the historical uses of studio filmmaking. Topics will include lighting, set design, blocking/performance, and cinematography with an eye towards how these tools can be deployed in a controlled environment. Students will gain an understanding of the technical and creative tools at their disposal in a studio setting, as well as the ways these tools may be applied for a broader filmmaking practice.

In this hands-on studio television production course, students learn professional studio methods and techniques for creating both fiction and nonfiction television programs. Concepts include lighting and set design, blocking actors, directing cameras, composition, switching, sound recording and scripting. Students work in teams to produce four assignments, crewing for each other’s productions in front of and behind the camera, in the control room, and in post-production.

In this course we survey four or more Hollywood film genres, including but not limited to the Western, musical, horror film, comedy, and science-fiction film. What criteria are used to place a film in a particular genre? What role do audiences and studios play in the creation and definition of film genres? Where do genres come from? How do genres change over time? What roles do genres play in the viewing experience? What are hybrid genres and subgenres? What can genres teach us about society? Assignments aim to develop skills in critical analysis, research and writing.

This course focuses on the history, production, and consumption of cult television. The beginning of the seminar will be focused on critically examining a number of theoretical approaches to the study of genre and fandom. Building on these approaches, the remainder of the course will focus on cult television case studies from the last eight decades. We will draw on recent scholarship to explore how cult television functions textually, industrially, and culturally. Additionally, we will study fan communities on the Internet and consider how fansites, webisodes, and sites like YouTube and Netflix transform television genres.

This course surveys the first half-century of cinema history, focusing on film structure and style as well as transformations in technology, industry and society. Topics include series photography, the nickelodeon boom, local movie-going, Italian super-spectacles, early African American cinema, women film pioneers, abstraction and surrealism, German Expressionism, Soviet silent cinema, Chaplin and Keaton, the advent of sound and color technologies, the Production Code, the American Studio System, Britain and early Hitchcock, Popular Front cinema in France, and early Japanese cinema. Assignments aim to develop skills in close analysis and working with primary sources in researching and writing film history.

This course charts the continued rise and development of cinema 1948-1968, focusing on monuments of world cinema and their industrial, cultural, aesthetic and political contexts. Topics include postwar Hollywood, melodrama, authorship, film style, labor strikes, runaway production, censorship, communist paranoia and the blacklist, film noir, Italian neorealism, widescreen aesthetics, the French New Wave, art cinema, Fellini, Bergman, the Polish School, the Czech New Wave, Japanese and Indian cinema, political filmmaking in the Third World, and the New Hollywood Cinema. Requirements include class attendance and participation, readings, evening film screenings, and various written assignments and exams.

This course serves as a historical and critical survey of Spanish cinema from the early 1970s to the present. Topics of study will include the redefinition of Spanish identity in the post-Franco era, the rewriting of national history through cinema, cinematic representations of gender and sexuality, emergent genres, regional cinemas and identities, stars and transnational film projects, and new Spanish auteurs from the 1980s to the present.

This course is designed to introduce students to recent film history, 1970-present, and the multiple permutations of cinema around the globe. The course charts the development of national cinemas since the 1970s while considering the effects of media consolidation and digital convergence. Moreover, the course examines how global cinemas have reacted to and dealt with the formal influence and economic domination of Hollywood on international audiences. Class lectures, screenings, and discussions will consider how cinema has changed from a primarily national phenomenon to a transnational form in the twenty-first century.

This course offers a historical survey of American television from the late 1940s to today, focusing on early television and the classical network era. Taking a cultural approach to the subject, this course examines shifts in television portrayals, genres, narrative structures, and aesthetics in relation to social and cultural trends as well as changing industrial practices. Reading television programs from the past eight decades critically, we interrogate various representations of consumerism, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, lifestyle, and nation in the smaller screen while also tracing issues surrounding broadcasting policy, censorship, sponsorship, business, and programming.

American cinema from 1967-1979 saw the reconfiguration of outdated modes of representation in the wake of the Hollywood studio system and an alignment of new aesthetic forms with radical political and social perspectives. This course examines the film industry’s identity crisis through the cultural, stylistic, and technological changes that accompanied the era. The course seeks to demonstrate that these changes in cinematic practices reflected an agenda of revitalizing American cinema as a site for social commentary and cultural change.

This course is designed as a critical study of global filmmakers and the issues surrounding cinema and its circulation in the twenty-first century. The class will emphasize the close reading of films to study different cultural discourses, cinematic styles, genres, and reception. It will look at national, transnational, and diasporic-exilic cinema to consider how films express both cultural forms and contexts. Aesthetic, social, political, and industrial issues also will be examined each week to provide different approaches for cinematic analysis.

Born as a response to the colonial gaze and discourse, African cinema has been a deliberate effort to affirm and express an African personality and consciousness. Focusing on the film production from West and Southern Africa since the early fifties, this course will entail a discussion of major themes such as colonialism, nationalism and independence, and the analysis of African symbolisms, world-views, and their links to narrative techniques. In this overview, particular attention will be given to the films of Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Mweze Ngangura, Zola Maseko, Oliver Schmitz, Abderrahmane Sissako and many others.

Narrative films are the product of many specialized artists working in concert toward a shared artistic vision. In this course, students will explore the essential crew roles on narrative films and choose an area in which they would like to specialize during the making of a collaborative project. Through the term, we will move through film development, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution with each student taking on a specific role in a group project. The term culminates in the exhibition of films that were made over the previous 10 weeks.

After Americans grasped the enormity of the Depression and World War II, the glossy fantasies of 1930s cinema seemed hollow indeed. During the 1940s, the movies, our true national pastime, took a nosedive into pessimism. The result? A collection of exceptional films populated with tough guys and dangerous women lurking in the shadows of nasty urban landscapes. This course focuses on classic American noir as well as neo-noir from a variety of perspectives, including mode and genre, visual style and narrative structure, postwar culture and politics, and race, gender, and sexuality. Requirements include two screenings per week and several short papers.

This course examines the history and theory of avant-garde and experimental cinema practices from the 1920s to the present, focusing upon radical innovations in style and technique. The course places particular emphasis on the social and historical contexts that have shaped alternative and underground film movements. Attention will be paid not only to the influence of parallel modern art movements, but the ways in which filmmakers have challenged conventional means of production, exhibition, and distribution. Topics include city symphonies, abstraction, found footage, seriality, Surrealism, psychedelia, experimental documentaries, video art, essay films, feminist critiques, and the transition from analogue to digital. Requirements include class attendance and participation, readings, evening film screenings, and various written assignments.

In recent decades, Korean cinema has emerged from the shadow of Japanese and Hong Kong cinema to become a globally significant and influential force. In this class students will study the history and aesthetics of Korean cinema, its global circulation, and its place in the imagining, representation and critique of Korean identity.

The mass appeal of Korean television dramas, or K-Drama, now radiates well beyond the borders of the Korean peninsula. Korean dramas are among the most popular offerings on streaming networks around the world. In this class students will learn about the history, social contexts and major genres of these forms of popular culture and the interplay of their popularity in Korea and beyond.

This course will introduce students to the global kaleidoscope that is Israeli society today. Since the 1980s the Israeli public has increasingly engaged with its multicultural character, particularly through films and documentaries that broaden national conversation. Our approach to exploring the emerging reflection of IsraelÆs diversity in its cinema will be thematic. We will study films that foreground religious-secular, Israeli-Palestinian, gender, sexual orientation, and family dynamics, as well as Western-Middle Eastern Jewish relations, foreign workers or refugees in Israel, army and society, and Holocaust memory. With critical insights from the professorÆs interviews with several directors and Israeli film scholars. Conducted in English, all films subtitled. Evening film screenings.

This course is a supplement in Hebrew for CAMS 236, Israeli Society in Israeli Cinema. Open to students currently in Hebrew 103 or higher, we will watch particular film clips from class without subtitles and discuss them in Hebrew. We will also read and discuss some critical reviews not available in English, and a sample of scholarly writing in Hebrew on Israeli film and social history.

Film adaptations of pre-existing texts (from songs to novels) have been around almost as long as cinema itself, and the percent of film adaptations continues to grow. (Of the top two-thousand movies over the last twenty years fifty-one percent were adaptations.) In this course we will take a chronological journey through the history of film adaptations in a variety of film cultures, considering along the way the processes involved in translating narratives from words to visual media, and how the cinematic has come to shape the literary (reverse adaptation). Discussions and assignments will aim at both analysis and practice.

This course explores a hybrid cinematic genre whose critical and creative energies spring from the collision of traditionally separated spheres: documentary and fiction, text and image, private and public, reason and intuition. We focus on the intersection where creative practice and intellectual inquiry meet through theoretical readings, film screenings, and the fulfillment of various production exercises aimed at the production of original film work. Screenings include works by Carmen Castillo, Chris Marker, Ignacio Agüero, Jem Cohen, Agnés Varda, Harun Farocki, Jonas Mekas, and other filmmakers who have explored this hybrid form.

This course explores the relevance and influence of documentary films by closely examining the aesthetic concerns and ethical implications inherent in these productions. We study these works both as artistic undertakings and as documents produced within a specific time, culture, and ideology. Central to our understanding of the form are issues of technology, methodology, and ethics, which are examined thematically as well as chronologically. The course offers an overview of the major historical movements in documentary film along more recent works; it combines screenings, readings, and discussions with the goal of preparing students to both understand and analyze documentary films.

This course offers a historical survey of developments in media technology from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which moving images, video games, computers, tape recorders, videocassettes, photography, the internet, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence have been instrumental in shaping human interaction and augmenting the senses. Individual units will examine how the origins of our contemporary media culture can be traced back to earlier—often obsolete—formats and technologies. Weekly screenings will demonstrate how filmmakers have grappled with the cultural and social impacts of emerging technologies. Requirements include attendance and participation, readings, and various written assignments.

This course traces developments in film technology from the nineteenth century to the present-day information age. Individual units will consider the ways in which technical and aesthetic innovations have further bolstered cinema’s status as a medium of mass entertainment. Particular attention will be given to immersive formats that have inaugurated seismic shifts in cinematic storytelling. Topics will include special effects, CinemaScope, Cinerama, Technicolor, World’s Fairs, theme parks, 3-D cinema, the emergence of the Hollywood blockbuster, IMAX, expanded cinema, digital cinematography, and computer-generated imagery. Requirements include attendance and participation, weekly screenings, readings, and various written assignments.

As video games have emerged as a dominant cultural form, they have become deeply intertwined with broader cultural debates around identity. By analyzing a variety of specific games as well as the industry that creates them and the communities who play them, we will think through topics such as liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal capitalism, feminism, queerness, ethical design, the military-entertainment complex, GamerGate, and discourses of political correctness. This course will avoid categorizing games as having “positive” or “negative” social effects and will instead focus on how video games function as a window into issues of identity in U.S. culture.

The focus of this course is on spectatorship—feminist, lesbian, queer, transgender. The seminar interrogates arguments about representation and the viewer’s relationship to the moving image in terms of identification, desire, masquerade, fantasy, power, time, and embodied experience. The course first explores the founding essays of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, putting these ideas into dialogue with mainstream cinema. Second, we consider the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical interventions posed by feminist filmmakers working in contradistinction to Hollywood. Third, “queering” contemporary media, we survey challenges and revisions to feminist film theory presented by considerations of race and ethnicity, transgender experience, and queerness.

How do we bring attention to an artifact or object, a gesture or speech? In this class students will become familiar with strategies and techniques of studio practices in film making. Students will be asked to think through the ways control can heighten our conversations in film, or bring attention to specificities. Through lighting techniques and camera techniques students will learn the slippery art of controlled environments. Projects will place pressure on students to integrate elements learned in the studio into larger film making practices while learning conceptual and historical conversations around the uses of the studio.

This course explores the creative practice of developing stories for narrative films. Students will draw inspiration from a variety of sources that are personal, cultural, or observational, and in doing so, develop confidence in their own artistic practice and perspective. We will learn the fundamentals of dramatic tools, use these tools to make screen ideas evolve, consider audience reception, and practice giving and receiving constructive critique. By the end of term, students will have generated ideas for future production projects that reflect their thematic concerns, and have a fully developed outline for a project that may be realized in an upper level production course.

This course examines the theories and techniques of sound design for film and video. Students will learn the basics of audio recording, sound editing and multi-track sound design specifically for the moving image. The goal of the course is a greater understanding of the practices and concepts associated with soundtrack development through projects using recording equipment and the digital audio workstation for editing and mixing.

This course addresses nonfiction media as both art form and historical practice by exploring the expressive, rhetorical, and political possibilities of nonfiction production. A focus on relationships between form and content and between makers, subjects, and viewers will inform our approach. Throughout the course we will pay special attention to the ethical concerns that arise from making media about others’ lives. We will engage with diverse modes of nonfiction production including essayistic, experimental, and participatory forms and create community videos in partnership with Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement and local organizations. The class culminates in the production of a significant independent nonfiction media project.

Through a series of exercises, students will explore the fundamentals of making narrative films. Areas of focus in this course include visual storytelling and cinematography, working with actors, and story structure. Through readings, screenings, and writing exercises, we will analyze how mood, tone, and themes are constructed through formal techniques. Course work includes individual and group exercise, and culminates in individual short narrative projects.

This course introduces students to the art of motion picture editing by combining theoretical and aesthetic study with hands-on work using the non-linear digital video editing software Adobe Premiere. We explore graphic, temporal, spatial, rhythmic and aural relationships in a variety of moving image forms including classical narrative continuity and documentary storytelling. Underscoring the strong links between concept, direction, shooting, and editing, this course examines the close ties between production and post-production. Through editing assignments and class critique, students develop expressive techniques and proficiency in basic video and sound editing and post-production workflow.

TV is a very specific, time-driven medium. Using examples from scripts and DVDs, students will learn how to write for an existing TV show, keeping in mind character consistency, pacing, tone, and compelling storylines. Students will also get a taste of what it’s like to be part of a writing staff as the class itself creates an episode from scratch. Topics such as creating the TV pilot, marketing, agents, managers, and more will be discussed. Finally, general storytelling tools such as creating better dialogue, developing fully-rounded characters, making scene work more exciting, etc., will also be addressed.

This course teaches students the fundamentals of screenwriting. Topics include understanding film structure, writing solid dialogue, creating dimensional characters, and establishing dramatic situations. Art, craft, theory, form, content, concept, genre, narrative strategies and storytelling tools are discussed. Students turn in weekly assignments, starting with short scenes and problems and then moving on to character work, synopses, outlines, pitches and more. The goal is for each student to write a 15 to 25 page script for a short film by the end of the term.

Topic: Advanced Writing for Television. This is an intensive writing practicum for motivated students to complete a well-structured original television pilot. The course will explore dramatic structure, character motivation and action, and the complex interplay between plot and character. Students will refine their tools for television writing as they develop and revise their pilot’s logline, tone, stakes, theme, and more. Over ten weeks students will move from concept to outline and then to a full draft of their original pilot. Weekly feedback provides students with an honest evaluation of their material in a dynamic and supportive environment.

Experimental Film & Video Production is a process-based production course focused on the conceptual and technical concerns of experimental film, video and other time-based arts. We will explore the personal, cultural, political, and formal/aesthetic aspects of experimental media through readings, writings, screenings and the production of experimental media projects. Key course concerns include medium specificity and relationships between sound and image, form and content, and theory and practice. We will consider “experimental” as a working practice rather than a genre–a way of testing hypotheses and a process of discovery.

This course presents the broader field of Sound Studies, its debates and issues. Drawing on a diverse set of interdisciplinary perspectives, the seminar explores the range of academic work on sound to examine the relationship between sound and listening, sound and perception, sound and memory, and sound and modern thought. Topics addressed include but are not limited to sound technologies and industries, acoustic perception, sound and image relations, sound in media, philosophies of listening, sound semiotics, speech and communication, voice and subject formation, sound art, the social history of noise, and hearing cultures.

The purpose of this seminar is guide students in developing and consolidating their conceptual understanding of theories central to the field of cinema studies. Emphasis is on close reading and discussion of classical and contemporary theories ranging from Eisenstein, Kracauer, Balazs, Bazin and Barthes to theories of authorship, genre and ideology and trends in contemporary theory influenced by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and cognitive studies.

This seminar aims to develop students into savvy critical theorists of television, knowledgeable about the field, and capable of challenging previous scholarship to invent new paradigms. The first half of the course surveys texts foundational to television studies while the second half focuses primarily on television theory and criticism produced over the last two decades. Television Studies covers a spectrum of approaches to thinking and writing critically about television, including: semiotics; ideological critique; cultural studies; genre and narrative theories; audience studies; production studies; and scholarship positioning post-network television within the contexts of media convergence and digital media.

In this course, students will develop a concept and complete pre-production for their CAMS production comps. Students will draw inspiration from a variety of sources that are personal, cultural, and observational, and in doing so, develop confidence in their own artistic practice and perspective. We will refine technical and formal strategies, consider audience reception, and practice giving and receiving constructive critique. Prior to registering for the course, students must submit a project proposal to the instructor. Final enrollment is based on the quality of the proposal. Note: This course is intended to prepare students for a Comps production project in winter term and it is the first in a two part sequence with CAMS 371. If you have any questions about enrolling in this course, please email the instructor.

Advanced Production Workshop II is taken in conjunction with CAMS 400 for students completing production comps. Production projects are inherently collaborative; this course supports collaboration through workshops, crewing, and informed critique. This course is the second in the advanced production workshop sequence with a focus on production and post-production. Please contact instructor for further information.