Course Catalog

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Course Catalog

PRINCIPLES OF VIDEO PRODUCTION (FM1019)

This course is designed to give you strong technical and conceptual skills in video production. Video and the moving image are everywhere in our world and a solid understanding of how they work will help you use them to pursue questions about the world around you. This course will prepare you for future video work in film, journalism, media and communications, studio art, and can be useful across many other disciplines on campus. You will learn to use the camera to raise questions and will work on several projects, each challenging you to explore new skills. Class time will be divided into lecture, screenings, in-class labs and critique. Outside class readings, shooting, editing and screenings will deepen your understanding.

FIRSTBRIDGE IN FILM STUDIES (FM1099)

Firstbridge courses are offered to degree seeking freshmen and registration is done via webform in pre-arrival checklist.

SCREENWRITING FOR TELEVISION (FM2018)

Over the past twenty years, Granada, HBO, and the BBC have been creating series such as The Singing Detective, Cracker, MI5, The Sopranos, and The Wire that are much darker and more persuasive and perverse than anything else on television or on the big screen. Students will examine these 'visual texts,' and will also outline one or two series of their own, working on individual scenes that will be dramatized in class.

THE ART OF SCREENWRITING (FM2028)

In Art of Screenwriting students consider the elements necessary for successful screenwriting practices, with close attention to the theory of screenwriting as influenced by other arts. In particular, a close emphasis of the course is on the art of narrative and the central role played by adaptation of novels in screenwriting practice. Character development, structure, dialogue and conflict are analyzed through exemplary scripting such as in the works of Jane Campion, Roman Polanski and others. The course culminates in a hands-on guided approach to scriptwriting by students.

DOCUMENTARIES IN ACTION: THE ART OF THE REAL (FM2032)

Course divided into theoretical and practical sections. The practical half of the course includes daily exercises in "hands-on" documentary research, scripting, sketching and shooting in the streets of Paris, with small video cameras, producing work that will then be critiqued in class. The theoretical component surveys the history of documentary film and different approaches to making documentaries.

PHOTOGRAPHIE ET LE CINEMA (FM2045)

This course will explore the bridges between photographic imagery and cinematographic imagery. This course will focus on contemporary artists (Cindy Sherman, Nana Goldin,Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, etc.) whose hybrid works reconstruct the real and dissolve identity. We will also focus on how the cinematographic eye converges with and complements the photographic eye (Larry Clark, William Klein, Raymond Depardon etc). Conducted in French, this course combines critical analysis of photos and films but it also integrates some practice(production of films and photographs).

INTRO TO HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM I (FM2075)

Cinema always raises questions about its times -- the silent era from 1895-1930 is no exception. This course looks at silent cinema through a global lens, tracing a range of influences in the development of film language from early film experiments, the rise of narrative, the work of early film pioneers, German and Soviet film explorations of mise-en-scene and montage, consolidation of the film industry and challenges from avant-garde cinema. The films we screen from Europe and the US,along with key works from Latin American, African and Asian cinema, reflect at a time of social and political upheaval and dazzling cinematic invention.

INTRO TO HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM II (FM2076)

Analyzes classical Hollywood style from the 1940s onwards, looking at the work of some of the masters of the American system including Welles, Wyler, and Hitchcock. Studies postwar Hollywood genres including: film noir, the musical, the comedy, the Western, the gangster film, and sci-fi films. Traces important directions of postwar European Art Cinema (in particular Italian Neo-Realism and the Italian and French New Waves) and offers a brief overview of ‘new' cinemas worldwide. Explores the important developments that have taken place in Hollywood from the 1960s through to the present covering topics such as: New Hollywood cinema, the auteur renaissance of the seventies and eighties, neo-noir in the nineties, the digital age, and contemporary cinema.

ORSON WELLES & HIS INHERITORS (FM2080)

Studies Welles' chaotic film career - his spectacular rise and fall, quest for a total cinema, exile, frustrations and triumphs, both as actor and filmmaker - and his place in American cinema. Films include: Citizen Kane, The agnificent Ambersons, Journey Into Fear, The Lady From Shanghai, Macbeth, The Third Man, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, and The Trial.